Black men and College

Intrepidyoungman is finishing up the 9th grade and has three more years before he leaves home and goes off to college. This gives me pause on a few levels. I remember being in my mothers house, walking to school and dreaming of college myself. I remember going off to college, studying, not studying, hanging out; things that seem at once so far away and so close. I remember my son's birth, him so small and fragile. Now he stands almost eye to eye with me, lean and muscular, sensing his impending manhood.

In three years he will leave for college, but the world he steps into is vastly different from the one I stepped into at his age. The competition is much much more fierce. Whereas I was able to get into an elite university with less than a 4.0 and good, not great SAT scores, that is almost unheard of now. I read of young folks being rejected with near perfect SAT scores and 4.2 GPAs. On top of that schools are much more expensive, topping $40,000 a year; some kids graduate with over $150,000 in debt and then weigh the prospect of graduate school.

I feel a special responsibility to prepare my son well for the simple fact that he is a nascent black man and there is a limited supply of black men going off to college. One of the imperatives of African American families and African American organizations, I feel, is to send young black men off to college. To the extent we wish to survive as a race this seems to me a must.