Time's Up on Multiple-Choice Test for College

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Preparing D.C. Students for College

LD Ross, Vice President of Programs at the DC College Access Program, talks about how many students go to college each year from D.C. and the kinds of issues they might face once there.

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For as long as she can remember, Gloria Watkins, 50, has told her son that education was his way out and up from the distressing circumstances that can envelop some young black men in Washington.

She had gone to the city's former teachers college for two years after graduating from Ballou Senior High School. But the costs piled up, and she left to go to work.

"School got pushed back," she said.

Gloria Watkins often took her son along to the nursing home where she worked to show him the consequences of bad choices: young men eager for low-wage jobs in food service but often turned away because of criminal records or poor communication skills. Don't get out on the street and do nothing, she told her son.

He was a standout student from the beginning, his mother said, and when it was time for high school, she enrolled him in Thurgood Marshall. There he won admission to a prestigious math and science summer program for minority students at Phillips Exeter Academy, spending three summers away from the District. He and his mother cried the first time he left.

It's an experience he will call on again as he gets ready to leave for college.

But first, he had to decide.

Watkins came back Sunday from a five-day senior trip in Florida, where he said he didn't think about college for one minute. Then the reality of classes, homework and the decision deadline reappeared.

It's Bates, Watkins said yesterday.

"They're giving me the best offer right about now. I'm not sure how it will be," he said. "But one thing I'm sure of is that it will give me a good education, and that's the most important thing."