By John Pulley

A visit with her Aunt Terri, a nurse, lit a spark inside a Tennessee schoolgirl named Amanda Green. “That’s when I realized what I wanted to be,” Amanda says, recalling that visit of more than a decade ago.

Around the same time, a fleeting glimpse of the Vanderbilt University campus fanned that spark into a flame.

“We were in Nashville, we drove past it, and I loved how it looked,” recalls Amanda, now a 16-year-old senior at Sale Creek High a School about 30 miles north of Chattanooga. “I was just 5 years old, but I remember telling my grandma that I wanted to go there. She looked back at me and said, ‘I hope you get there.’”

Her grandmother told her that Vanderbilt had “the best nursing college you can get into around here,” Amanda says. “I wanted to go to the best and be the best. If that’s the right university, that’s where I want to go.”

Almost a dozen years later, on a warm June morning in a rural corner of Hamilton County in southeast Tennessee, Amanda and two other people gather on a home’s front porch to chat before the air turns thick.

Amanda’s grandfather, Leroy Green, 75, settles into an aluminum frame patio chair. Resting on his knee are the weathered hands he has used to make his way in the world – hands that kept him employed, in the prime of his working years, as a heavy-equipment mechanic on the construction site of the nearby Sequoyah Nuclear Plant.

“My Papaw built our house with his hands,” says Amanda, sitting on the porch boards at his feet. She and her parents live with Papaw and his wife. Amanda’s father, an Air Force veteran, is now unemployed. Her mother works in a pencil factory and admonishes her daughter: “Don’t end up like me.”

The third person on the porch this morning is Cara Ables, a senior at the University of Georgia. She has come to help Amanda aim higher. Cara is working at Sale Creek High School as a summer intern, a position developed through a pre-college access and preparation program called the Partnership for College Access and Success (PCAS). Cara’s job is to help the school’s upperclassmen and their families explore postsecondary aspirations.

Cara is taking the students on college visits, helping them to refine their post-graduation education plans, and meeting students’ families in their homes – and on their front porches.

As the sun rises, two young women and an old man warm to the topic.

“I guess money is the main thing,” says Papaw. “She wants to go to Vanderbilt. I don’t know right now. It would have to be looked into.”

Cara mentions that the University of Georgia is a good school, too, and that her own grandfather was a huge fan of the Bulldogs football team. (But Cara knows the obstacles Amanda faces. Cara doesn’t mention it, but her grandfather was adamant that college wasn’t an option for his own daughter. As a result, Cara’s mother, the first person in her family to graduate from high school, has held jobs cutting hair, working in an artificial-turf factory and staffing the desk at a real-estate development company.)

Papaw worries about boundaries. Pausing to shoo a small, mixed-breed dog off the porch, he reveals his fear that Amanda might leave home. “That would be another thing, going over there and staying over there,” Green says. “We’ll have to decide later about Vanderbilt or Georgia.”

“She has a cousin at Bryan,” Green goes on, referring to Bryan College, a Christian institution in nearby Dayton, Tenn., that is best known for the Scopes “Monkey Trial” held there in 1925.

“The preacher up here is a Bryan graduate,” Green says, hopefully.

Cara tries to redirect the conversation. “It’s hard to get a good job now without a college degree,” she says. Papaw, undeterred, stays on topic. He concedes, though, that Amanda “hasn’t mentioned Bryan too much, but that’s one that’s close. I think it might be kind of hard to move away.”

“You wouldn’t like me going away?” Amanda asks.

“I don’t know,” says her Papaw, a man who has never strayed far from where he was born, at the foot of Bakewell Mountain and in the shadow of Flat Top Mountain, about a mile away. “I’d have to see where you’d stay.”

“I’d be willing to start out at a community school,” Amanda offers, “but I’d eventually like to venture out into a bigger college. I want to be able to know that I can handle things on my own.”

“I want to experience other stuff,” she says later. “I want to get out of this town and see what else is out there.”

What’s “out there” is a world quite different from the one Leroy Green grew up in. It’s a new world whose interconnected, digital-driven economy requires skilled, adaptable workers. It’s a world in which education beyond high school is a necessity for entry into the middle class. (See related story, New economy, new challenges.)

“The knowledge and skills you need to succeed in postsecondary education are those that you also need to have access to a job that pays reasonably well with growth potential,” says Michael Cohen, president of Achieve Inc., a nonprofit organization created by the nation’s governors and business leaders to help states raise academic standards and achievement.

Yet students from groups with low college-going rates continue to encounter barriers that block them – especially if they are first-generation students, low-income students or students of color. Impediments come in many forms, from inadequate information about college to insufficient financial resources, from cultural barriers to inadequate K-12 education, from indecipherable financial aid forms to a simple lack of planning.

Students, families and communities seeking to clear those hurdles must be more purposeful, organized, comprehensive and diligent in their preparation for college, experts say. Hundreds of programs have sprung up to help, many in the past decade. (See our list here for a representative sample).

Drawing attention to the barriers – and the help that’s available to overcome them – is the point of a new public service campaign that will soon hit the airwaves. (See Ad campaign promotes college knowledge). The effort, developed by the Ad Council with funding from Lumina Foundation for Education in partnership with the American Council on Education, is called the National College Access Campaign. It seeks to convince low-income, prospective first-generation college students in grades eight to 10 that, if they want to go to college, they can’t leave it to chance.

Research conducted by the campaign’s creators reveals that more than 90 percent of low-income students aged 14-16 plan to earn a college degree. Those aspirations plummet by the time those students reach college-going age. More often than not, their once-high expectations vanish. The ad campaign, set to roll out this fall, hopes to overcome a lack of information that undermines the aspirations of disadvantaged teens who “live in a kind of bubble,” say the campaign’s architects. “They know very little about how to pursue their dream of a college education. ... The students are not connected with resources that can help them. ... Instead, [they] say that college will happen if they just get good grades and don’t get into trouble at home or in school.”

Among other barriers, low-income, ethnic, first-generation students that aspire to graduate from college often attend high schools that inadequately prepare students for academic success and have too few resources to help them successfully navigate the college-admissions process.

There are cultural impediments, as well. The conversation on Leroy Green’s porch speaks volumes about an ambivalence toward higher education that often plays out in rural areas, where college campuses are sometimes viewed with a measure of suspicion.

“There are perceptions of colleges being immoral places that don’t share the rural values that predominate in Chattanooga, the buckle of the Bible Belt,” says Dan Challener, president of Chattanooga’s Public Education Foundation (PEF). “Parents know that if they send their kids off to college, they might not get them back.”

Then there is the issue of money. College costs are rising more quickly than the availability of funds to help students with financial needs. For as long as Amanda Green can remember, for example, she has wanted to study nursing at Vanderbilt, but she and her family haven’t saved nearly enough to cover the private institution’s annual tuition, fees, room and board, which last year totaled about $42,000.

Still, Amanda perseveres. “I’m a Christian, so I believe that God will take care of me,” she says. “I put my trust in Him.”

Working to rewrite the song of the South

Like many communities, rural Tennessee is undergoing rapid change. As recently as 30 years ago, foundries, factories and farms employed more than half the workers in Chattanooga, which was known as the Dynamo of Dixie.

With no historical imperative for postsecondary education, Tennessee’s proportion of adults with four-year college degrees is 19.6 percent, ranking it 42nd among the 50 states. Between 10 percent and 15 percent of graduates of Sale Creek High School are the first in their families to earn a high school diploma.

Lately, however, most of the well-paying blue-collar jobs have left the South. Today, less than 20 percent of Hamilton County’s workers are employed in the manufacturing sector, and farmland is being overtaken by residential development. Interstate 27, formerly a two-lane road, became a divided highway a decade ago, a development that has helped transform rural Hamilton County into a burgeoning bedroom community of Chattanooga.

Some longtime residents of the area do not seem to fully grasp the implications of these changes. When Sale Creek’s guidance counselor, Jenny Smith, arrived at the school four years ago, students joked that they planned to attend “Lazy Boy University,” referring to the local furniture manufacturer. Layoffs at the company have all but ended admissions at “LBU,” but many parents still remain unsure about packing their sons and daughters off to college.

“Their mamas and daddies are afraid that they will get lost, or that they’ll be hungry,” says Devota Barnes, principal at Sale Creek.

continued on next page