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The ACCESS Project
Exhibit and Invited Lectures
Contact Information
Vivyan Adair
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2001 Year End ReportFROM THE DIRECTORIt was just a little over one year ago, that seventeen nervous but very excited low-income parents from central New York began a journey that would change their lives and those of their families and communities in profound and enduring ways. In January of 2001 these parents formed our first class of ACCESS students at Hamilton College. This class, and the students that followed them, have had a remarkable year filled with academic, personal, employment, and family success. As they embraced the challenge of becoming educated citizens moving toward career positions, they demonstrated that with hard work and adequate support, low income parents--often with no history of educational and/or career achievement- -can become increasingly successful, fulfilled, and contributing members of our culture. In the process they become role models for their families, friends and neighbors, and inspire us all. In the past year, our ACCESS students have met extraordinary challenges and grown as individuals and as a community. They have learned to balance the demands of rigorous scholarship at Hamilton College with the economic, social, intellectual, material, and emotional needs of their families. As a group our students have overcome a variety of family and personal crises that might have discouraged less dedicated or resourceful students. In the process of negotiating these barriers and successfully working toward the completion of a liberal arts college degree, our students have developed crucial critical thinking, creative, analytical and communicative skills, have mastered a broad range of important subject knowledge, and gained credentials that will enable them to become increasingly productive citizens, scholars, workers, and parents. By combining scholarship with work, students in our program are well on their way to completing college degrees that will lead to financially secure and fulfilling career employment. Watching our ACCESS students mature and grow reminds me of my own journey of empowerment through the pathway of higher education, which began fifteen years ago. Having tried rather unsuccessfully to raise my own daughter on welfare, I know all too well the desperation and hopelessness that shape and patrol the lives of poor women in the United States today. Yet, I was fortunate enough to have been involved with a pre-reform welfare system, with superb educational institutions, and with instructors who enabled me to positively transform my life and that of my daughter. In 1987 I joined almost half a million welfare recipients who had enrolled in institutions of higher education as a route out of poverty. As a result, today I have a Ph.D. (University of Washington, 1996) and am productively employed as an assistant professor at Hamilton College where I have the opportunity to work with supportive and brilliant colleagues, bright and earnest students, and friends who embrace, support, and nurture me. My healthy and happy daughter--who is now a sixteen year old honor student--and I are also very active in the community, engaging in volunteer work and public service. We strive to be conscientious citizens and contributing members of the college community, New York State, and the nation. Certainly, access to post-secondary education permanently changed my economic status, my self-esteem, my capacity to think clearly, critically and creatively, my ability to care for my child, my commitment to citizenship and my authority and value in the world. This year, as I was completing research on the process and costs/benefits of supporting low-income parents in institutions of higher education, I made a revealing calculation. I tabulated the cost of the state and federal benefits I received while "on welfare" and in college from 1987-1991. The total cost of my AFDC (welfare) grant, food stamps, medical coupons, section eight housing, and an annual energy grant for four years came to a sizable $30,000. During that period of time, and for almost fourteen years before I entered school, I had paid few if any taxes, indeed I was often entitled to an Earned Income Tax Credit. It happened that on the day that I made these calculations I received my W-2 tax form reflecting that I had paid almost $30,000 in state and federal taxes in the past year alone. Over the next twenty years--even without cost of living adjustments-- I will go on to pay approximately $600,000 in additional federal and state taxes. The bottom line is that the taxpayers' modest investment in my future will yield the state and federal government a net gain of at least 2000 percent. As telling, (and as serendipitous) as this calculation is, it does not begin to reflect my actual financial contribution as a tax-paying property, home and auto owner, parent, and consumer. It also does not reflect the ways in which my entire family has been positively transformed as a result of the investment that my country made in me at a turning point in my life. Certainly not all poor parents are willing or able to go to college and earn degrees. But to prevent those who can from doing so is short-sighted and financially irresponsible. Supporting low-income parents who are earning college degrees makes moral, intellectual, cultural, and fiscal sense. The remarkable success of our ACCESS students provides even more compelling evidence that access to liberal arts education and pre-career employment, coupled with a comprehensive support network, allows low-income parents to exit intergenerational poverty to become educated, economically secure, and self sufficient workers and citizens. As the acting director of The ACCESS Project at Hamilton College, I am filled with pride when I recall our students' achievements and I am energized and renewed as I look forward to a new year filled with remarkable accomplishments as students continue to meet and surpass cultural and personal expectations and goals. My co-director, Erol Balkan, and I thank ACCESS students, faculty, staff, and all of those who have so generously supported and inspired us in our important work. Because of your efforts, Hamilton College will continue to lead the way as we assist and guide our students in challenging themselves to lift their families out of poverty on a permanent and productive basis through the life-altering pathway of higher education. Vivyan C. Adair, Ph.D. Director, The ACCESS Project at Hamilton College |
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