by: Loren Hall
Education is the key to creating a
future. American citizens who earn a college degree make a much more
considerable amount of money than those who don’t have one. There was once a
time where people could get by with a sixth grade education. Those times have
LONG passed. Then there was the era where simply having a high school diploma
would suffice, but those days are gone as well. In today’s society, it is
almost impossible to find a job to live and thrive off of without already
possessing a degree. However, for us African Americans, it’s not that simple.
We are stuck in a viscous cycle that
is keeping us down. We want to go to college to get an education and get ahead
in the world, but we can’t advance because of one simple problem. We can’t get
into the colleges. In general, White Americans have a better education than we
do because they can get into the prestigious schools, like Yale, Harvard and
Princeton. African Americans make less money, live in poorer neighborhoods, and
live in conditions that do not allow them to make the money necessary to
achieve. I can use myself as an example. Straight out of high school, I was
accepted to Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University in Tallahassee,
Florida. I went there for one semester, and was already in debt. Coming from a
low income family, we didn’t have the money to pay for the school. People on
the other end of the socioeconomic spectrum would argue that FAFSA is there to
help us,. In my situation, they gave me as much aid as they were willing to
give us and there was still a $5000 balance left that my family was unable to
pay.
Because of the pressure put on
society, we were unable to get any loans to pay it off so I had to leave. I am
now at Community College of Philadelphia, the one place I did not want to end
up. Community colleges are designed to be much cheaper, with a perceived poorer
education than one of the high end schools, and there for the majority of minorities
end up at these schools. Hundreds of African Americans are in the same predicament
as I am. At Community College of Philadelphia, 73% of its population is
non-white. However, at Temple, a more prestigious Philadelphia school, 60% of
its population is white in contrast to its only 14% African American
population.
We don’t have money because we don’t
have education, and we don’t have education because we don’t have money. It’s an
impregnable cycle that needs to be addressed.
