The hit Broadway play “In the Heights” centers around the story of Nina, a child of the barrio who is the first in her family to go to college, indeed to Stanford. She grapples with financial woes that affect her academic standing and compound her problems. She tells no one until the deans tell her it is too late. She goes home in shame and only with great difficulty tells her family that she has left school.
The family and the community have seen her as heroic for escaping the poverty of their lives. So her fear that she has disappointed them was truly painful. However, her supporters are willing to take desperate steps to get her back to school again. The audiences that fill the seats are not the traditional ones, but look more like the players on the stage and clearly identify with the story. I identified with the dean who had to give Nina the bad news and see the tragedy written on her face.
Nearly half the students who start college do not finish. My book, I CAN Finish College, is the product of many conversations that I have had with hundreds of students sitting across from my desk at New York University, Hunter College, Princeton and Metropolitan College of New York.
My former career was in public affairs and marketing. I understand the importance of communication both for information and for motivation. My years as a dean made clear to me not only the student’s need for more information, but also their need for motivation to tap the resources at hand. At the same time, I knew there was a growing crisis of college attrition among students who are in the first-generation of their families to attend college and among those who are members of minority-groups.
As I contemplated a book to address these concerns, I had conversations with literary agents and publishers early on but concluded that they did not share my sense of urgency or commitment. My research showed that there was nothing on the market that provided the depth of basic information and motivation that these students needed.
In the meantime, the book was taking shape rapidly in my mind, and words began to flow as soon as I sat down at the computer. I established blocks of time to write in spite of the demands of my consulting projects with various colleges, and, in fact, the consulting work often added to the text. My research and my work continued to confirm the importance of the issue.
Given the lack of interest in the traditional publishing world, I explored self-publishing and chose lulu.com to produce and distribute I CAN Finish College. More important, I created a team: a designer, Leah Lococco, editor, Cheryll Greene and two high school interns from the Futures and Options Program to take the book from vision to reality. All had a dedication to and understanding of the book’s purpose, and each added value to it.
