Message from the Vice President of Alumni, Communications and Philanthropy
I have been reading a new book titled “Class Dismissed: When Colleges Ignore Inequality & Students Pay the Price,” by Anthony Abraham Jack, who has visited Berea. Jack focuses on “elite” colleges that have long served wealthy white students but today are diversifying their previously homogeneous campuses. As we know, Berea has been different from day one—serving students who were excluded from higher education.
Jack argues that elite colleges have dismissed socioeconomic class but celebrate getting students to the starting line of enrollment. Berea, I would argue, realizes that it’s precisely at enrollment that the work with students begins, not ends. One staff member I know when asked by our new president what his job involved answered, “Like everyone else here, my job is to get students across the graduation platform.” What a remarkable awareness of what working at Berea—regardless of job description—involves. For our students, it doesn’t matter where you start; it matters where you finish.
Jack writes, “…[S]o much happens…between matriculation and graduation, between the thrill of getting in and the slog of getting out. There is a lot of life lived in those intervening years.” Colleges, he writes, “are not paying enough attention to the everyday realities of those they let in.” They “remain woefully unprepared to support the students who make it in.”
One thing that distinguishes Berea College from others is that it strives to know as much as possible about the students it serves, providing them with the skills and support they need to succeed. These include a new laptop at matriculation, relocation funds for a security deposit on a new apartment after graduation and everything in between.
Each year, we strive to get better at knowing how to sharpen our financial aid: this year, for example, Berea is waiving student fees thanks to a generous donor. Doing so acknowledges Jack’s statement that “Nothing is truly cheap when you’re broke”—even a small fee for one class and another fee for something else.
A second distinguishing characteristic of a Berea education is the ingredients in its “secret sauce:” Deep diversity indicative of our motto, God has made of one blood all peoples of the earth, juxtaposed with socioeconomic homogeneity so that no student generally has less or more than another. We also sprinkle into the mix unparalleled support to meet, if not exceed, Berea’s high expectations. And presto!
“Social class,” Jack writes, “can either create a buffer to the world’s problems or bring us closer to those problems.” In Berea’s case, social class is used to facilitate intellectual, social and economic mobility for every student served, which can impact generations to come.
Other institutions can learn a lot from a small but mighty college on a ridge at the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, just as you have in your support of Berea.
Thank you.
