In late May, so close to high school’s finish line that she could almost taste it, Amiya Roberts was seized by momentary terror.
Dreaming ahead to college in the fall, the Reynolds High School senior logged into her Portland State University freshman profile and found notifications that she had been approved for a $5,500 loan and to pay $4,000 from earnings in a work-study position.
The only problem? She didn’t remember applying for either a loan or an on-campus job.
“Im in a crisis,” Roberts panic-texted, so stressed that she gave little thought to punctuation or spelling. “Please tell me what I just did!!???!!? AM I IN DEPT?”
At that moment, it felt to her like everything she’d worked so hard to build back since a disastrous COVID-imploded freshman year, when she simply stopped showing up to her online classes, could slip away.
Roberts is one of only about 800 or so Black students graduating from Oregon high schools this spring, the vast majority of them in the Portland metro area.
Only a dozen years ago, the percentage of the state’s Black high school graduates enrolling directly in college or community college handily outpaced that of their white counterparts, a point of pride for a small community that’s worked hard to build a network of organizations to support its young people. In 2012, 73% of Black graduates continued on to higher education, compared with a statewide average of 65%.
But a lot changed in a decade.
Among the high school class of 2021, the most recent for which data is available, just 54% of Black graduates went on to college within 16 months of graduating, representing a steeper 10-year plummet than for any other demographic group in Oregon except Pacific Islanders. The drop from that 2012 high was gradual as the 2010s progressed, then accelerated when the pandemic hit.
Oregon has an established and growing network of programs to help Black teens find their way to higher education, including long-tenured programs like Self Enhancement Inc., sometimes short-handed SEI, which works with students from Jefferson, Grant, Parkrose, Reynolds and David Douglas high schools, and local chapters of national nonprofits including the Urban League and the UNCF.
But they’re up against some powerful forces, including the ceaseless gentrification that has pushed Portland’s small Black community farther and farther from the city’s core, dispersing families primarily to East Portland and farther east in Multnomah County. Gun violence also takes a disproportionate toll on Black youth, particularly young Black men.
Against that backdrop, Donnell Morgan, executive director of Elevate Oregon, a mentorship organization that works with students of color at Parkrose and David Douglas school districts from elementary school through 12th grade, said that he has heard over and over from students that — like Roberts — they are apprehensive about taking on the spiraling costs of college.
Over the past 20 years, Oregon lawmakers have increasingly relied on tuition to cover the costs of operating public universities. Yearly tuition and fees average $13,440, the most expensive of 15 western states. Oregon’s community colleges cost an average of $6,464, second only to South Dakota.
In 2023, the state expanded its signature tuition grant program, which now covers about 75% of the cost of tuition at two and four-year institutions statewide for the neediest students. Individual colleges have also launched initiatives to try to help: Portland State’s “tuition-free degree” program, for example, fully covers tuition and mandatory costs beyond federal Pell grants for 60% of in-state students.
But such state and federal aid programs don’t always take into account living costs and discretionary fees, which can quickly balloon into debt that takes years to repay, not to mention forgone wages when students opt for higher education instead of a full-time job, Morgan said..
Even students who do make it to college don’t necessarily last long, Morgan said.
“Over my eight years here at Elevate Oregon, we’ve sent some kids off to college and then, shoot, three or four months later they’re back here in the community,” he said. “And it’s like, ‘Hey, what’s going on?’ And they say: “Donnell, I just couldn’t afford it.’”
One of the state’s most established and successful mentorship programs for Black students, Self Enhancement tries mightily to anticipate those problems, issuing some scholarships that can offset costs like housing and books and assigning post-high school mentors to help troubleshoot for students who’ve gone on to college.
SEI is also giving more attention to expanding apprenticeship programs for students who want to bypass or put off college, said Trent Aldridge, the nonprofit’s chief program officer.
“Life has options,” Aldridge said. “College is a pathway, but it’s not the right path for every student. If you leave $200,000 in debt, the math doesn’t equal out for folks. You can make a great living and you won’t go into debt doing it.”
The bottom line
For Roberts and her classmate Kesha Williams — a bubbly extrovert whose 10th grade feud over SnapChat with Roberts somehow morphed into a best friendship — the question mark of how to pay for college has loomed over their entire senior year.
The girls have similar stories: Like Roberts, Williams mostly gave up during the freshman year of online school: “After winter break came, I just stopped going. And my GPA was like, a .8 or something. I had no motivation. Nobody was pushing me,” she said.
Once school buildings reopened, both girls rebuilt their academic footing via summer school, extra credit, tutoring and make-up classes. Williams stayed at Roberts’ home for occasional stretches while her own family coped with housing insecurity, spending stretches living in their car, in shelters and at motels.
And they both linked up with SEI, which meant they had access to academic mentors, social get-togethers with other Black teens, a chance at a trip to tour historically Black colleges and universities junior year and a shot at the brass ring: the organization’s scholarships.
By senior year, they’d both come a long way.
Roberts’ last-ever report card came back with straight As. And she grew so close to her SEI coordinator, Mahogany Bradford, that she felt no compunction about video chatting her late at night for emergency math tutoring. With her support, Roberts completed both her application to Portland State and her Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA.
Word of her acceptance to Portland State came first, followed by several anxious months waiting on notification of her federal student aid. By mid-May, that too was in place. Roberts had secured $15,000 towards tuition and fees, the maximum award for students with the greatest need.
Along with that award came the source of her momentary panic: By demonstrating a certain level of financial need and qualifying for a Pell grant, she was automatically pre-approved for the $5,500 federal loan with a favorable interest rate and the chance to apply for a job on campus – neither of which she has to accept.
Roberts was on her way, if a little daunted by all of the logistics. At a spring open house for admitted students at Portland State, she seemed overwhelmed by the tables of cheerful ambassadors wearing PSU swag and talking up their programs, promoting the plusses of studying abroad or championing independent study projects with professors.
“I just want to be a lawyer or a therapist,” she said. “I’m really set. None of this stuff interests me.”
She’d expected a classic college vibe, more like the TV show “Grown-ish.” Instead, the campus seemed echoing and empty, which her student tour guide chalked up to few classes meeting on Friday mornings. Peeking into staged dorm rooms, Roberts said she could imagine herself living on campus, but room and board would cost thousands of dollars that she didn’t have.
Williams, meanwhile, was thriving socially, captaining the high school’s step dance team, starring in the track and field and being voted prom queen. She considered going all the way to Arkansas to run track at a historically Black college, but eventually decided to stick closer to home. She thought about Clark College, across the Columbia River in Vancouver. But by late May, she’d set her sights on Mount Hood Community College, just down the street from her high school, where she thought she’d study art or architecture. After two years there, she figured she could transfer to one of the historically Black colleges she’d seen on her SEI tour.
But, like hundreds of thousands of students around the country, Williams ran into problems with her FAFSA form. An older sister is her legal guardian, and Williams needed her help to properly turn in the form before she could have certainty about her college plans. And pinning her down proved difficult.
“I would have gotten it done, if [the system] was not having trouble, but it was having trouble for weeks,” Williams said. “When I finally got to it, there was this segment that said ‘We need information from your legal guardian,’ and I put it in and it wasn’t working. And then, yeah we were supposed to do it. But time went by and I procrastinated.”
Scholarship Dreams
Their paths had also diverged when it came to their SEI scholarship dreams.
Both girls submitted essays, but only Roberts made the cut for the interview round, during which she haltingly told her life’s story. She wanted to be a lawyer, she told the SEI committee, because one of her mother’s former boyfriends had abused her sister. When her sister finally found the courage to speak up, no one in the justice system took her seriously and their case went nowhere, Roberts said. She wanted to grow up to be the person who would listen to people like her family members and find a way to help them.
All spring, she waited for the scholarship committee’s decision, which was delayed for weeks due to the federal government’s disastrous rollout of its new financial aid system. Its myriad technological problems left colleges nationwide unable to tell students how much aid they could offer until months after the usual deadline.
At last, on the first Saturday in June, Roberts’ mother told her they were going out to dinner with Bradford, her SEI coordinator, to celebrate the impending end of high school. An unsuspecting Roberts had just started to tuck into a Bloomin’ Onion and a shrimp cocktail appetizer at the dimly-lit Outback Steakhouse in Vancouver Mall when a phalanx of SEI employees swept past the restaurant’s hostess --scattering waiters and busboys -- to present her with balloons, flowers and a giant check with her name on it.
She’d won a $5,000 per year scholarship. That was enough, when added to her federal and state aid, for tuition, fees – and some breathing room.
“Y’all, college is paid for, baby! I’m lit! Let’s celebrate,” a giddy Roberts cried out, throwing her arms around everyone within reach. “We about to be lawyers!”
One of the people she hugged was Williams, who was celebrating her friend’s dreams coming true while still not knowing what would become of her own.
Just two days later, Williams still hadn’t connected with the older sister whose information she needed to fill out the FAFSA. That meant she’d missed a key deadline to apply for an Oregon Promise grant, which would have covered her tuition costs at community college.
“I have absolutely no clue,” Williams said in June, post-deadline. “I’m going to go through my mom’s email to see if I can fill it out myself.”
Bradford was also keeping a careful eye on the teen. Though she missed the deadline for the Oregon Promise grant, she has until June 30 to submit her FAFSA form and get some financial aid, Bradford said. But she and Williams both acknowledged that starting community college in fall was becoming more complicated, though not completely beyond reach.
Roberts said she would keep the faith for her friend. After all, they’d already come so far.
“Shoot, I thought I was going to be homeless on the streets,” Roberts said. “That’s one of my biggest fears. I was thinking that was going to be me if I didn’t get my life together. I don’t want to be depending on my mom all my life. If I’m paying the rent at my mom’s house, I can pay the rent on my own house, someday.”
Now all she had left to do was graduate.
“I’m excited and scared at the same time — all those people looking at me,” Roberts said. “It really is an accomplishment.”
— Julia Silverman covers education policy and schools for The Oregonian/OregonLive. Reach her via email at jsilverman@oregonian.com. Follow her on x.com at @jrlsilverman.
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