By Emmanuel Felton, The Hechinger Report, October 30, 2019
Rodney Woods was on the fence about applying to Nicholls State University, a four-year public institution a 20-minute walk from his mother’s house in Louisiana’s Bayou Region, a rural area of the state dotted with sugar cane fields and mud-colored swamps. He had been on campus a few times. Both he and his mother loved to practice their photography skills among the long-slung red-brick buildings clustered around the school’s tidy quad.
Woods thought about going away to college, but he believed attending a local public school would save his family money. Even so, Nicholls, where tuition and fees reach toward $8,000 and room, board, textbooks and other expenses can add another $13,000 per year, would be pricey for a family that gets by on less than $10,000 a year. If accepted, he planned to live at home with his mother and younger brother to save money and walk or, if he was lucky, get a ride to school.
He was exactly the kind of student Nicholls hoped to attract. He had stellar grades in high school and is civic- minded, taking after his mother, who works as a community organizer in Thibodaux. But Woods’ financial aid only included a federal Pell Grant for low-income students and a $500 GO Grant. He would still have to take out about $3,500 in loans just for his first year.
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