Ivy degree – now what? Low-income grads struggle with careers, status
When Chantel Brown was a child in rural Morganton, N.C., she savored the illusion that she “could come off as middle class.” That doesn’t take much when one-quarter of the residents live in poverty. But Ms. Brown cleaved to the bling she had: her family’s one-story brick home in a one-street subdivision with a fancy name, “River Hills.”
Underneath that veneer of status, though, her extended family battled every cliché you’ve heard about rural life: low education levels, poverty, and “an addiction to something.” Her father, a long-haul trucker, was rarely there. Her mother, in poor health, relied on Brown for help. Her parents struggled with debt. Brown felt the weight of low expectations, of being seen as just another poor black girl from the South. “Even from preschool,” she says, “I knew I was expected to be a teen mom.”
But Brown liked numbers. Or rather, as she put in her college essay, “my eyes were glued to the board whenever my teacher wrote out a math problem.”
By her senior year of high school, she had run through every Advanced Placement course the school offered. She earned a near perfect score on the SAT Math II subject test. She had a 4.0 GPA. In other words, Chantel Brown was the ideal candidate for an elite college.
It is perhaps no surprise that Brown was accepted at 19 of the 23 schools to which she applied – including most of the marquee names in higher education. She ended up attending Brown University in Providence, R.I., majoring in applied math and biology. Last May, she graduated and landed a job at The Parthenon Group, a consulting company in Boston, “making more than anyone in my mom’s family makes or will ever make.”
All good – absolutely good – with one exception: The success she has achieved comes with a mother
