DEL.ICIO.USECONOMIC CRISIS: CREDIT CRUNCH
Spelman student’s dream threatened by money problems
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Sunday, October 12, 2008
A school counselor directed La-Keya Williams to Spelman College, telling her she could grow and thrive there.
In two years at the historic black women’s college in Atlanta, Williams found it to be so. She was majoring in psychology, hoping to go home to Philadelphia as a school counselor who would encourage other students to live up to their potential.
But her college career hit the national credit crunch head-on when she started trying to pull together financing for her junior year. She got the same message from a federal student loan program, two banks and a private loan corporation: don’t bother to apply.
Cobbling together the roughly $32,000 for a year at Spelman — including tuition, room, board, books and activities — had always been a struggle.
Her single mother, whom, she said, makes about $26,000 a year at a residence for mentally impaired people, took out a $22,000 loan for her only child’s freshman year. The next year, Williams borrowed $22,000 in her own name. Both years, she made up the difference with grants, smaller loans and jobs.
With no loan in sight weeks before she planned to head back to Spelman as a junior, Williams had less than $6,000.
Williams’ story has a happy ending because of an anonymous gift.
She received $20,000 through Spelman’s Starfish Initiative that matches donors with students who would otherwise have to drop out because of money. The program’s name comes from an allegory about a girl rescuing starfish washed ashore by a storm. Confronted by a passer-by who told her she couldn’t help them all, she tossed another one into the sea and replied, “I helped that one.”
Williams’s eyes watered as she looked around her campus. “I never take lightly being here,” she said.
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