In 2007 my email inbox dinged with a name I recognized but hadn’t seen in more than 20 years. I was living at the time in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, working as a journalist. I recorded stories from across Southeast Asia for public radio and was about to publish my first book. The email’s sender said he’d wanted to reach out to me for a long time. He was retired and was driving a camper through the West and Southwest United States with his wife. And he’d never forgotten me.
His name was Jim Dollinger. Dean Jim Dollinger, if you want to be professional about it. For two years, he watched the implosion of my dismal high school career from his administrative perch as dean of students. In the email, he said he’d followed my work in the two decades since, reading some of my early writing in The Chicago Tribune, where I got my start, and every now and again he looked me up to see what I was up to.
And then he apologized. He apologized to me. He said he felt the school had failed me. “Schools just didn’t know what to do with kids like you in those days,” he wrote; they weren’t equipped to deal with my situation.
My situation was this: I was finishing my sophomore year of high school and had probably attended fewer days than I’d missed. I’d failed nearly all my classes, and my transcript boasted a 0.47. (I say “boasted” because you really do have to miss quite a lot of school to fail so spectacularly.) Then there were the fistfights. The weed. The acid.
All of this was the public face of my private hell. My mother died when I was 8, and my father remarried quickly, moved us across the country and enrolled us in a religious school, throwing my brother and me into physical and emotional chaos. My new family and those in our social circles used the scrim of evangelicalism to justify or ignore stunning levels of abuse and violence. My response to this was to fight back, to sneak out, to do whatever drugs I could corral, to fight, to flee. Once, I sat on the floor in front of my father slicing at my wrists with a fishing knife.
But it was the suspensions that did me in at school; more than seven in a single academic year doomed you. And I had well over seven. I might have had 17.
Mr. Dollinger had no choice but to expel me. I remember his face the day he called me to his office. He seemed almost ashamed by having to formally cut me loose. For my part, I tried to maintain my swagger: No big deal; I didn’t need school anyway. But I walked out of his office trembling. I knew I had really done it this time. I’d hit my lowest point.
On that day in 1985, I became one in a population of children who are still far less acknowledged than their brilliant counterparts, those who garner headlines for their perfect G.P.A.s, their athletic prowess, their unflagging service to the community. Kids like me don’t get headlines unless they are part of the crime blotter or they take their own lives. The number of young high school dropouts has been slowly falling with time, but there are still around two million out there. I think I know some of what they’re going through: That day in 1985, I felt unseen, forgotten before I’d even begun to be anything at all.
My stepmother picked me up from Mr. Dollinger’s office, and as we drove home, my entire, bleak future stretched out before me. I was 16 years old. I bused tables and washed dishes at a Mexican restaurant, the lowest of low-income jobs. How would I survive the next year, the next 10, the next 70?
What ultimately saved me was the willingness of one man, who happened to be a college-admissions officer, to see me as a person — not as a subpar transcript or a series of boxes left unticked but as a complicated human who’d had very few opportunities and a lot of bad luck and who had made a series of regrettable decisions but might make something of her life nonetheless.
Three months after my expulsion, I was kicked out of my parents’ house. For the next three years, I stumbled through more low-wage jobs at restaurants, at a factory, at an ice cream store, at a burger joint, at a gas station. I sold chef’s knives and pots door to door and magazine subscriptions and makeup. Not old enough or stable enough to sign a lease, I surfed co-workers’ couches, friends’ floors and sometimes parking lots in my beater car.
Eventually I started handling bookings for a local rock band. One friend I met through the work, a producer and engineer, taught me about contracts and riders, percentages of the door versus flat rates, marketing and publicity. And one day, when I was 19, he said, with more kindness than the words suggest: “You have to go to college. You want to be a loser for the rest of your life?”
I was not obvious college material. Unlike those world-changing kids vying for a handful of spots in fancy colleges, I didn’t have choices. My only hope would be a college where someone was willing to hear my story and then take an enormous chance on me. That turned out to be a tiny school in a far western suburb of Chicago called North Central College. The man was Rick Spencer, the head of admissions, who sat me in his office and listened. I had no letters of recommendation, no SAT or ACT scores, no sports, no extracurriculars. What I did have — and what he asked me to talk about — was motivation, a sense of how the bleak life I’d been living for three years would be my life forever if I didn’t do something vastly different.
North Central College gave me a life. I went on to attend graduate school, then to travel the world as a foreign correspondent, to give birth to a daughter, to publish multiple books and to eventually become a professor. Not one of these successes would have been possible without the man who took a chance on me.
Last month my fellow Times contributing writer Megan Stack wrote an essay about the unpredictability of life, how things can still turn out all right even for the troublemakers and the academically flailing. My life is a testament to her point. But having lived through that life arc, I also know that whatever vision I began to craft for myself required the willingness of adults to take a risk on a kid who, on paper, looked thoroughly unpromising. This is a willingness I worry is in increasingly short supply, particularly at colleges, where applicants are reduced to transcripts, recommendation letters, essays and test scores.
We live in a time when so much focus is on already high achievers and the challenges they face creating lives for themselves in our hypercompetitive world: the pressure they feel to be and do everything before the age of 18, to have unshakable visions and plans for their futures that involve getting into colleges of their choice and then somehow paying for them.
I know that a four-year college is only one avenue to a successful life — and that it by no means guarantees one. I also know that community colleges and vocational schools offer just as many opportunities.
But what made getting into college particularly significant for me was not just the opportunities a degree afforded, but also the sense that I was there because someone had taken the time to meet me, to listen and to ultimately believe I had potential. When Mr. Spencer sat in the admissions office of North Central College and said, “I’m going to take a chance on you, Rachel Snyder,” those were probably the most important words of my life. The language matters. He wasn’t just giving me a chance; he was also staking himself on my fulfilling whatever promise he must have seen in me. Chances always work two ways. Someone gives; someone else takes. But the risk is shared.
It’s not just that I worry that there are fewer opportunities today, whether through college or work, for the million-plus kids out there with no high school diploma or G.E.D. (and that the Pell Grants that made it possible for me to go to college and once covered more than three-quarters of the cost of attending a four-year public college now cover roughly 30 percent). I worry that there are fewer adults willing to take those all-important chances on those of us the world today seems to have so little time and attention for. College is hard. And expensive. And what university wants to accept a kid like me who might bring down its all-important rankings?
I posed these questions to Mr. Spencer recently. He agreed that my trajectory would be difficult to replicate these days. “Every decision made is much more visible now,” he said. “The whole acceptance and recruitment process is so much more analytical.” He is formally retired, but he is still involved with the college, and he said conversations around the art and science of building a class seem more focused on the science, less on the art. “For someone taking a chance on somebody, there’s going to be much more exposure to ‘Why this person and why not this person?’ I didn’t have to worry about any of that.”
Then he mentioned another young student that he took a chance on years ago who is now a member of the college’s board. It might seem like low stakes, a matter of acceptance or rejection for just that one life, just that one person. “But it’s not just one person,” Mr. Spencer told me, “because one person impacts so many.”
My daughter is now the exact age I was when Mr. Dollinger expelled me. She earns straight A’s, holds a leadership position in her class and plays on the school’s lacrosse team. The running joke in our house is that good grades and thrifted Free People clothes are her form of rebellion. Yet even with pretty stellar records, she and her peers feel awash in anxiety over every test, every extracurricular decision, every semester’s course schedule. They track acceptance rates the way C.F.O.s track the stock market.
Her experience couldn’t be more different from mine, and yet what we share from our teenage years is the dread that what happens now will forever determine what happens later. I am eternally grateful that this wasn’t true for me. But for her and her peers? And for those thousands of other kids like me once, whom the world doesn’t see? I wish I could reassure them that their futures aren’t necessarily determined by their youthful decisions — good or bad. But honestly, I’m not sure I can.
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