Like many Americans, I left my small Ohio town for college and then followed professional opportunities to a larger city. My working-class parents hadn’t gone to college, but I did, thanks to nurturing K-12 schools and to the federal government’s Pell grant program for poor kids, of whom I was certainly one.
Over the years I have worked as a journalist and author, dropping back into Urbana for holidays and reunions. But around 10 years ago I began to go for longer stretches, to look in on my aging mom.
My hometown still had the same postcard-cute facade, but I quickly realized something drastic was underway. For the first time I noticed Confederate flags flying in a town once heralded as an Underground Railroad hub.
I didn’t recognize the place in which I had once known people on nearly every block of every street. I wanted to retain that recognition not just for myself, but also because I want to live in a country where believing different things doesn’t mean complete estrangement.
This desire lead me to meet Silas James, a high school senior and marching band drum major whom the teachers at Urbana High described as “a young Beth Macy,” by which they meant a relatively smart and hard-working kid whose family situation was insecure verging on chaotic and who needed help.
Silas’s future seemed bright except for at least one detail. He didn’t have a car. But it’s not just having a car that starts every time that people on the other side of poverty might take for granted.
I’m not exaggerating when I say it was a miracle that I left Urbana for college in my mom’s rusted Mustang, praying the whole way that its slippy clutch would not give out. I managed the good fortune to leave town before falling into premature parenthood or addiction, both of which have saddled generations of my family. My dad died of late-stage alcoholism and lung cancer when I was 19.
As I got to know Silas, I was struck by how much steeper the climb out of poverty was for him. I grew up with examples of success all around me. I counted not just teachers and parents of my friends but also a local judge, his librarian wife and our mailman (whose route overlapped with my paper route) among my loudest cheerleaders.
Not so for Silas. In Champaign County, of which Urbana is the seat, the number of food stamp recipients has nearly doubled since 1990, and foster-care placements have tripled since 2015. It would not be an exaggeration to say that Silas is just one of many struggling people in Urbana.
As Silas led the marching band onto the field, crowds cheering, he was homeless and couch surfing at friends’ houses, and dealing with the aftermath of having been sexually abused by an acquaintance while his parents were in jail. Silas’s father, an intermittent presence in his life, was also struggling and would die of a methadone overdose combined with Covid and a heart blockage.
No one doubted Silas had the intellectual chops to attend a four-year university, but his steadiest mentor, his band director, urged him to enter a short-term trade program at a community college so he could avoid crushing student debt. A job as a certified welder, which Silas determined would be his future, paid more than twice as much as his McDonald’s shifts.
Pell grants covered my tuition, room and board, and even my books. Because of skyrocketing college costs and the drastic defunding of higher education dating back to the 1980s, today’s Pell grants cover roughly 30 percent of a poor kid’s four-year education. Silas got scholarships for his community college program, but they covered tuition; he had no funding for reliable transportation for his two-hour daily commute (no public transit was available), nor could he pay for housing near the college that would have also removed him from his family’s traumatic environment.
Throughout the 2023-24 school year, I watched as Silas went through five clunker cars and four low-wage jobs while attending community college. While I worked work-study jobs for beer and pizza money during college, Silas worked full time for living expenses.
Hardships in his family were a constant drag on his psyche. He dropped out the first week of his first semester after his mother got into a car wreck and required round-the-clock supervision for a concussion. During his second semester, his mother began using drugs again and lost custody of Silas’s younger siblings. By the time Silas earned his welding certification, the best welder in his class, he was 19 and about to be named the legal guardian of two teenage siblings.
His only debt was a small loan he took out to buy the most reliable car he could afford to get himself through the program’s final months — a Honda Accord with 211,000 miles that was younger than Silas by a year.
I could not have handled the responsibility of being a teenager raising teenagers, but Silas has largely thrived. He’s engaged to be married to his boyfriend (whose teacher parents are supportive) and is employed in a managerial position with benefits in a nearby town.
Silas’s transition into adulthood has no doubt been complicated by his parents’ choices. But the degree to which he has had to literally pay for those choices is stark. My own parents struggled, but thanks to robust schools and college grants (that I have more than paid back through my taxes), I was able to turn the page on those struggles in a way that Silas, perhaps, will never be able to do.
While college completion rates have been trending upward for decades, a degree remains out of reach for a lot of Americans, many of whom have bought the story that they wouldn’t want to go anyway. The flywheel of economic fatalism and resentment, fueled by wages that don’t seem to budge, has been spinning now for two generations.
That sense of hopelessness is a primary driver of partisan hatred and inequality. For the past 40 years, Republican and Democratic leadership alike stopped thinking of higher education as a public good and basically privatized it to the tune of more than $1.7 trillion in individual student debt.
I’m no better than Silas, and it’s not fair that he and his siblings continue to face such fierce headwinds without the help I took for granted.
We owe him more. We owe all our children more.
Beth Macy is an author.
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