There's a high school in Camden, New Jersey, I call the Jill Scott School. It's the Camden Creative Arts High School. Those teachers and kids are so passionate about what they do, and 98 percent of the senior class went on to college.
I was scheduled to graduate from high school in 1943, but I was in a course that was supposed to give us four years of high school plus a year of college in our four years. So by the end of my junior year, I would have had enough credits to graduate from high school.
My parents had two rules: You had to go to college, and you had to pay for it yourself. So we all did.
When you reach a level of status - and making it to college is an accomplishment in itself - you are trying to define who you are.
They were often the first students in their family to go to college and the very idea of higher education was still foreign to them. They had to make a conscious and often difficult decision to come to college.
My mother was very strong on me to go to college. No one had ever been to college, including my parents.
I saw myself as an outsider as a teen. I was home-schooled and got my G.E.D. when I was 16; I wasn't interested in high school at all and figured that college might be more entertaining.
When I was 18, graduating high school, I was going to the University of Missouri.
Being the first in my family to go to college, I believe, is my greatest accomplishment. It's not my accomplishment; it's my family's accomplishment.
For whole swaths of people, that map of, 'Come along this way, come to college, do this and that,' isn't offered.
It was sort of assumed, from the time I was born, really, that I would go to college. That's sort of the way that Jewish families in New Jersey handled things; that was the norm.
Shortridge High School was an elitist high school. In a way it was a scandal because you could go there no matter where you lived, if you could get there. It was for over-achievers. It was for people who were going to college. So we were very special and we were hated for being ritzy.
It is one thing to take as a given that approximately 70 percent of an entering high school freshman class will not attend college, but to assign a particular child to a curriculum designed for that 70 percent closes off for that child the opportunity to attend college.
