With a 2.0 high school GPA, Xavier Hickman thought college was unattainable.
But mentors in the TRIO Upward Bound Program challenged him to not limit himself. A low GPA didn’t have to block him from going to the next level. Hickman’s family didn’t have much, and the program was designed for students in exactly that situation, helping them prepare for college and, in his case, introducing him to Harris-Stowe State University, St. Louis’ only historically Black college.
Yet, that chance at a higher education was nearly ripped away earlier this spring. The 19-year-old, now a rising junior at Harris-Stowe, was among the first-generation college students who were caught in the middle of a legislative debate on how Missouri funds higher education. Just weeks before the spring semester ended, a proposed funding model threatened to tie college budgets to full-time enrollment numbers — a formula that would have starved smaller institutions of the resources they needed to survive.
