Vive Griffith

As caps and gowns are readied at college campuses, including dozens of schools in the Philadelphia area, we must note who will be left out in this year’s commencement ceremonies: nontraditional learners who don’t follow the typical college trajectory. Less than half of these learners graduate within six years. Nearly three-quarters of all undergraduates today are “nontraditional”— they may have a gap in their education between high school and college, work full-time, or be single moms.

The high school generation is galvanizing people worldwide to demand gun reform, and the mobilization of hundreds of thousands of protestors at the March For Our Lives this spring made their leadership clear. Now that the march is over, how can adults who came out for the march continue to support and help build youth power? As arts educators, we offer one potential answer: To catalyze what's possible, adult writers and artists need to share their tools and platforms with youth.

I've spent the past decade teaching the types of students targeted by for-profit colleges. The adults I've taught in Free Minds, a cost-free program in Austin affiliated with the Clemente Course in the Humanities, show up ready for a second chance in education. Returning to school for them is often nothing short of inconvenient. They live on low incomes, work multiple jobs and have faced barriers to the classroom that range from homelessness to raising children alone.