By Jon Marcus/The Hechinger Report
Maya Portillo started life solidly in the middle class. Both her parents were college graduates, they sent her to a Montessori school, they took family vacations and they owned a house in Tucson filled with the books she loved to read.
Then, when she was 10, Portillo’s father left, the house was foreclosed on and the recession hit. Her mother was laid off, fell into debt and took Portillo and her two sisters to live a hand-to-mouth existence with their grandparents in Indiana.
“It could have happened to anyone,” said Portillo, who took two jobs after school to pitch in while trying to maintain her grades. “I can’t even begin to describe how hard it was.”
She choked up. “It’s really hard to talk about, but when you have to help put food on the table when you’re in high school, it does something to you.”
Portillo recounted this story in a quiet conference room on the pristine hilltop campus of Cornell University, from which she was about to graduate with a major in industrial labor relations and minors in education and equality studies.
Her long path from comfort to poverty to an against-the-odds Ivy League degree gave her firsthand exposure to how even the smartest low-income students often succeed despite, rather than because of, programs widely assumed to help them go to college.
This is happening as tens of billions of dollars of taxpayer-funded and privately provided financial aid, along with money universities and colleges dole out directly, flows to their higher-income classmates.
Posted on December 8, 2017
