On a muggy Saturday morning in August, 18-year-old Dajourn Anuku stood outside the Port Authority Bus Terminal in New York City, wearing cutoff jean shorts and a baseball cap sporting the phrase “Be Humble.” A large, meaty kid, Dajourn was sweating beneath the weight of his massive backpack and a plastic shopping bag stuffed with laundry detergent, paper towels, and dryer sheets. Earlier that morning, he’d lugged all of this from a Georgetown University dorm room to his bus, where the driver requested $35 for the luggage. Dajourn had the money but wasn’t willing to part with it. He’d just finished a pre-college summer program at one of the country’s most prestigious universities, but he was still the son of Nigerian and Jamaican immigrants from blue-collar Canarsie, Brooklyn—a kid who schlepped his laundry detergent, paper towels, and dryer sheets across five states because that stuff cost money.
Luckily, Dajourn was good at persuading people. “He can talk his way out of anything,” his father, George, told me that morning as we drove to Port Authority. Sure enough, Dajourn convinced the driver to drop the luggage fee.
If Dajourn could get himself out of sticky situations, he could also get himself into promising ones. There aren’t many black, first-generation students at Georgetown, which Dajourn refers to as a “PWI,” or predominantly white institution. This year, 12 percent of Georgetown’s admitted freshmen were black, and 11 percent were first-generation college students. The school has need-blind admissions, but the median family income of a Georgetown student is about $229,000, and 74 percent of its students come from the country’s top 20 percent of earners. In contrast, only 3.1 percent of students come from the bottom 20 percent.
[For more on this story by Jennifer Miller, go to https://medium.com/s/youthnow/...n-dream-cf4f2f8c6dd4]
Comments (0)