NEW YORK — As she struggled through yet another difficult class last year, Marleny Hernandez felt her dream of becoming a nurse slipping away — again.
She was halfway through a two-year associate degree program at Borough of Manhattan Community College. Hernandez, a 33-year-old mother of four and high school dropout, had already overcome an array of obstacles on her nearly five-year journey.
“No matter how much I studied, I was failing,” Hernandez said, recalling the pediatric and medical-surgical care course that almost felled her. “I was just so frustrated.”
Hernandez had persevered through a difficult pregnancy, the demands of children, a job as a home health care aide and her other tough courses. But now the professional degree that could propel her entire family toward the economic stability they had never known was vanishing from sight.
“I was crying so much I didn’t know I was able to create any more tears,” said Hernandez, a petite woman with a mass of curly brown hair who lives in a two-bedroom public housing apartment in East Harlem with her husband and four children.
Overall, students who are parents are 10 times less likely to complete a bachelor’s degree within five years than students who are not.
The odds of continuing were not in her favor. More than one in five college students are parents, according to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, and some 42 percent of them attend community colleges. Overall, students who are parents are 10 times less likely to complete a bachelor’s degree within five years than students who are not.
Nursing, the nation’s largest health care profession, has always been among the hardest majors at BMCC. It’s also a nearly surefire way into a recession-proof career that pays well, especially this year, as a pandemic has stretched the U.S. health care system to its limits and accelerated the demand for qualified health care professionals.
For Hernandez, the pandemic was not turning out to be an opportunity. It was her biggest obstacle yet.
When the coronavirus began its dramatic and insidious spread, with New York City at the epicenter nationally, Hernandez became sick.First, her asthma acted up. Soon, she had chills, a fever and a headache that wouldn’t quit. Then she lost her senses of taste and smell. There were few tests available for coronavirus at the time, so she didn’t get one. Her resolve to stay in school weakened.
“I think I am going to withdraw this semester,” she wrote in a March 29 email to Cecilia Scott-Croff, the director of BMCC’s Early Childhood Center, where her 2-year-old son, Jayce, and 6-year-old daughter, Anjerlin, had been regulars. “I am very stressed with everything that’s going on, and then I was really sick. I couldn’t study the way I wanted to.”
A few days later, she got a call from Marva Craig, BMCC’s vice president of student affairs, urging her to stick it out and reminding her how badly nurses were needed now.
“You can do it,” Craig insisted. Hernandez wasn’t so sure.
SPECIAL REPORT
Becoming a nurse
One truth has emerged during these dark pandemic
months: the U.S. faces a dire shortage of nurses. Yet our
reporting has discovered just how difficult it is to educate
and train the next generation of nurses. Higher education
is falling behind, hospitals are stretched thin and getting
through programs can be an arduous journey.
Second chance
Parents like Hernandez have particular challenges when they go back to school. They most often enroll at community colleges, where students are usually older and working and often the first in their families to attend college, and where graduation rates are notoriously dismal. Such students are also the most likely to change their plans, recent research shows.
Even before the pandemic, many student parents struggled with hunger and homelessness, hurting their chances of finishing degrees in programs that could guide them out of poverty toward a stable middle-class life — programs like nursing.
Hernandez knows things might have turned out differently for her if she had not made some missteps as a teenager.
She came to the United States from the Dominican Republic at age 3 with her mother, who still doesn’t speak English. She became the family translator.
They lived in various apartments in the Bronx, where Hernandez excelled in school. She remembers being named valedictorian of her junior high, and as a result winning a scholarship to St. Pius V, an all-girls Catholic high school (since closed).
In her sophomore year, she fell for Cliff Robinson, two years older and no longer in school. He had trouble holding down a job, she said. Hernandez became pregnant in her junior year, and again a little over a year later. She never got her diploma, but she earned her GED and enrolled in a certificate program to become a medical assistant.
Those were difficult years. Her second son, Nasiir, slept little and didn’t speak. He was diagnosed with autism at 18 months, and needed special services and early intervention programs.
There were more setbacks. Robinson still couldn’t hold down a job. The couple argued. One day in June 2012, Hernandez told him to leave. He then picked up a gun she didn’t know he owned and shot himself in the head, while the children slept nearby. The medical examiner ruled his death a suicide.
“Marleny has the heart of a nurse. She is a very caring person, very empathetic, but professional. She’s had all sorts of obstacles she’s jumped over and under and gotten around, but she’s still pressing on.”
Edna Asknes, assistant professor of nursing, BMCC
Hernandez moved back in with her mother and worked at various health care jobs. On a trip back home to the Dominican Republic, she began dating Jesus Hernandez; they married in 2013. Anjerlin was born the next year. Hernandez was soon back to work as a medical assistant.
Helping others became her favorite part of the job. Friends and colleagues suggested she try nursing.
“I just loved working with kids,” she said. “I kept thinking: ‘Yes, that’s what I want to do. I want to be a nurse.’ ”
Nursing journey begins
In 2016, Hernandez decided to go back to school for her associate degree in nursing at BMCC. She enrolled first in its highly supportive Accelerated Study in Associate Programs (ASAP), which helped her figure out what courses she needed to take in order to apply for the highly competitive two-year nursing program.
Hernandez had stopped working as a home health aide by then and was in school full time. After breakfast, she would strap her daughter, Anjerlin, into a stroller, jump on the subway and travel 40 minutes downtown to BMCC. Anjerlin played happily at the child care center, while Hernandez went to class and studied.
At first, it seemed manageable. But her workload grew. There was never enough time. The steps up from the subway felt like a mountain on the way home, where other duties awaited. Before going to bed, she looked over homework and schedules for her two older children, Michael, now 16, and Nasiir, 15.
She tried studying late into the night and again early in the morning, but became pregnant again, and was often sick and constantly exhausted. Her grades began to slip.
“I was scared,” Hernandez said. “People were telling me I wouldn’t get into the nursing program without straight A’s.”
Hernandez ultimately passed the prerequisites for the R.N. program, but decided against taking the grueling entrance exam in January that would have allowed her to begin. Jayce was born in February 2018, and Hernandez spent as much time as possible studying for the May test instead. Depending on the year, more than 200 applicants may vie for between 80 and 90 spots, said Judy Eng, chair of BMCC’s nursing program.
Despite her fears, the test went surprisingly well. Hernandez will never forget the call she got at home, telling her she had passed.
“I started jumping, screaming, telling my husband, my mom, my aunt, my whole family — anyone who was around,” she recalled. “I was just filled with joy.”
‘Mommy, am I going to see you tonight?’
The hard work began that fall, when she entered the nursing program full time. Her aunt helped out with Jayce, who wasn’t old enough yet to attend BMCC’s child care center. By January, classes in mental health and maternal-newborn nursing care had become tougher than expected.
And Hernandez’s daughter, Anjerlin, then 4, grew more demanding. She had started public school and no longer traveled to BMCC with her mother, and didn’t understand why she saw so little of her.
“I would be in school by 9 in the morning, and my aunt would be with the kids so I could stay late and study, but Anjerlin didn’t understand,” Hernandez recalled. “When I left in the morning, she would say, ‘Mommy, am I going to see you tonight?’ It broke my heart.”
Hernandez studied hard, but still failed some key exams several times. That’s when she had a talk with her husband, Jesus, who works long hours in construction for an interior design firm.
“I really need to pass,” she told him. “I need your help.”
Jesus promised he would try get home from work earlier. Dinner became cereal many nights. Laundry piled up. Hernandez kept studying — and struggling.
A nursing professor, Edna Asknes, saw how discouraged Hernandez seemed and suggested she withdraw and take the difficult maternal-newborn nursing class again. Hernandez declined.
“I spoke with a group of students in the program, and I told them, ‘I’m not withdrawing, I’m just going to push through,’ ” Hernandez said.
Asknes, a full-time faculty member at BMCC, knows the course trips up many nursing students.
“It’s not black and white, there is a lot of critical thinking,” Asknes said. “There’s a learning curve, and it’s frustrating for students when they aren’t getting it on the first or second time around. It takes a lot of persistence and dedication.”
The classes are long and intense and involve weekly hospital visits, so Asknes got to know Hernandez well.
“Marleny has the heart of a nurse,” Asknes said. “She is a very caring person, very empathetic, but professional. She’s had all sorts of obstacles she’s jumped over and under and gotten around, but she’s still pressing on.”
Hernandez managed to pass that spring — barely — and was off all summer. By that February, Jayce was old enough for the onsite Early Childhood Center at BMCC that Anjerlin had loved. He played happily while she studied and went to class.
Related: How parents of young kids make it through college
Centers like BMCC’s that support parents who are students are recognized as a key component of student success. This year, foundations and policy groups put together $1.5 million in prize money for potential solutions aimed at supporting student parents.
There’s now a toolkit aimed at helping this group, as many have struggled mightily during the pandemic. A poll released this month found that when students have the support to connect their education to a career, they are more likely to say their education will be worth the cost.
“When I left in the morning, she would say, ‘Mommy, am I going to see you tonight?’ It broke my heart.”
Marleny Hernandez, nursing student, on her 4-year-old daughter’s reaction to school days
At the same time, policymakers are taking note of a looming crisis: The number of new students enrolling in community college tanked by a stunning 23 percent nationally this fall, while college going among first-time beginning students was down a sharp 16 percent compared with a year earlier.
These declines confirm worries that poor and minority students are being left even further behind, their problems exacerbated by the economic devastation of the coronavirus.
Related: Long before the coronavirus, student parents struggled with hunger, homelessness
At BMCC, whose students are among the most economically disadvantaged in the U.S., more than a quarter of students who responded to a survey during the pandemic were worried they would not have enough food, and most said they needed support for housing, utility bills and general living expenses, according to BMCC President Anthony Munroe.
‘Don’t quit!’
BMCC’s child care center became a lifeline for Marleny Hernandez. Scott-Croff, the director, saw Hernandez struggling last spring and told Craig, the student affairs vice president, about her plan to drop out. Craig, a graduate of BMCC who later earned a doctorate, was her secret weapon for students on the edge.
Craig loves speaking with students and often has tissues on hand when they visit her office. On a Sunday afternoon last March, she called Hernandez and gently asked how she was doing.
“I was so surprised to hear her voice,” Hernandez said.
They talked about nursing. “I listened to how important it is to her,” Craig recalled, “and we talked about the difference she can make in her own life and the lives of four other people if she becomes a nurse.”
She reminded Hernandez that nurses are in great demand and can earn upward of $80,000 annually, with an array of schedules that make the profession manageable for a mother of four.
“You can lift a family out of poverty and into the middle class just by being a nurse,” Craig told Hernandez. She also told her that she, too, had once been a nursing student, back home in Jamaica, but had been too afraid of needles to stay with it.
“I grew up on an island where there weren’t many options for a profession like the one that I’m in now,” Craig told Hernandez. “The one successful person in my family was a nurse.”
She also referred Hernandez to an advocacy center at BMCC where she could apply for food, counseling and emergency funds. A counselor called Hernandez a few days later asking what help she needed to stay in school.
“I felt so much better after talking to her. It really helped me,” Hernandez said.
Afterward, Craig sent notes of encouragement, as did Scott-Croff, who recalls writing some that were straight to the point: “Don’t quit, don’t quit, don’t quit!”
The notes and calls made a world of difference.
“I was so scared and stressed and sick and feeling awful, but they made me feel that someone really cared,” Hernandez said. “I owe them so much.”
The number of new students enrolling in community college tanked by a stunning 23 percent nationally this fall.
Last spring, Hernandez passed both the midterm and final that she and many other students had missed in March when the school shut down in-person learning. She immediately wrote to thank Scott-Croff.
“Without your words of encouragement, I would not have made it,” Hernandez wrote. “I was ready to give up and you didn’t let me. Thank you for having faith in me and always helping me.”
This fall brought more challenges. Two of her children opted for online learning, with only Nasiir attending school in person. Michael studied in the bedroom he shares with Nasiir. Hernandez took most of her classes on Zoom, with Anjerlin keeping up in first grade at her side and Jayce often on her lap, or with her mother.
The isolation may have been hardest for Anjerlin, a gregarious 6-year-old.
“I could really use some new friends,” she told a stranger visiting her mom this fall.
With an ending to her long journey in sight, Hernandez thinks about the many conversations she’s had with her younger sister, who works in human resources at Jacobi Medical Center in the Bronx. She hears about the shortage of nurses constantly.
“They need so many nurses, they need so much help, and I just want to tell her, ‘I want to go help!’ ” Hernandez said.
That opportunity might come in a few more months.
‘Never give up’
A snowstorm was on the way on the day of final exams in the nursing program at BMCC this month. Hernandez bundled up, but still shivered as she walked out of the building, lifting her blue surgical mask to reveal a smile of relief and joy.
She had passed the last course needed to finish the program. The final – 30 percent of her final grade – had been particularly tough. The professor met individually to tell each student their grade.
“You can lift a family out of poverty and into the middle class just by being a nurse.”
Marva Craig, vice president for student affairs, BMCC
“I was so nervous I don’t remember what she said, but she was smiling,’’ Hernandez recalled.
In the next few months, Hernandez will apply for a nursing license and then begin studying for the licensing exam she must pass before applying for jobs. She’ll also begin applying for a bachelor’s of science degree program in nursing, hoping to attend college part-time while working as nurse. And of course, she plans to show up on Jan. 6 for the virtual ceremony that will replace the traditional in-person pinning ceremony.
Plenty of obstacles await. Newly minted nurses will start their jobs under enormous pressure, as they wait for vaccines.
Hernandez will worry about that, certainly. But for now, she’ll celebrate Christmas with her family, and appreciate just what it took to achieve her dream.
“A lot of times people told me I wasn’t going to make it,’’ she said, tearing up beneath her mask as she discussed her long journey over a steaming cup of coffee. She hopes her children will learn from what she went through and all she sacrificed to stay with the program.
“You just have to keep going, no matter what others say about you,’’ she said.
“Just keeping pushing and never give up.”
This story about student parents was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.
Going Back to School After 30 Years: How I Overcame the Fear of Writing in My First College Class
I decided to go back to school after the worst time of my life in 2015. I lost my mom in February, which took so much out of me. I tried to live my life as best as I could without her; my children still needed me.. Then in November I lost my job I had been holding for 22 years because my employer, a supermarket chain, was going out of business. I wasn’t sure why all this was happening to me, but I knew I had to figure out something to do. I chose to go back to school to get my GED before looking for another job. So I enrolled in the Adult Continuing Education Program at LaGuardia Community College. While in the program, the director would always ask students if they were going to college after getting our high school diploma. My answer was no because I felt I needed a job. But the more I thought about it, the more I knew I needed more than a high school education. Therefore, I enrolled in the Business Administration A.S. Degree Program at LaGuardia and started taking my first college writing class in the fall of 2018.
Coming back to school after 30 years was very scary. I was always on pins and needles. I didn’t catch on as quickly as other students. So I’d just keep reading until I understood what was being asked to do. I took my High School Equivalency Test in March 2018 and got 500 on the writing test, which means I just passed by the skin of my teeth. The way they teach today is very different from when I was in high school back in 1985. I felt I didn’t have the knowledge that everyone else has today when it came to writing a proper essay. I was glad that they have accelerated composition classes to help students like me who decided to come back to school after so many years.
In the composition class, when I was given my first essay assignment, I was so nervous that I wanted to run out the door. We read memoirs by former college students and the professor asked us to write about the lessons we learned from them. When the professor asked me to write a draft for peer critique, I wrote mainly about my misfortune because this was what I had been thinking. I wrote that I was in a real bad place and felt myself slipping into depression. I had to find something to do, but I could not work because I broke my left ankle shortly after I lost my mom and my job. But my two peer reviewers didn’t think my draft was good. It was all about myself and didn’t focus enough on the lessons I learned from the memoir.
After I got these comments, I spent five hours in class and many more hours at home revising the first draft. I was able to state more clearly that the memoir “showed me that if you settle for nothing you will get just that nothing.” But the professor wanted me to further develop my thesis. I didn’t understand what a thesis was; nor did I know how to relate it to topic sentences. I realized I needed help. I had seen a flyer about the college’s tutoring services. I went there to inquire and made an appointment. The tutor read the professor’s comments and kept asking what I meant by the sentences I had written. After each forty-five minute tutoring session, I spent two more hours revising the draft.
My second draft got a better comment. The professor wrote that now I needed to write more about two aspects of the main character: “focus” and “determination.” So I smiled because his response meant I was getting somewhere. But I didn’t fully understand what the words meant. I was still too embarrassed to ask the professor. I went back to tutoring two more times. The tutor explained what “focus” and “determination” would mean for people who just started college and found it challenging. The meanings became clearer to me. I revised the paragraph and added these sentences: “The lessons of focus and determination are important to me. I just started college and I’m learning that people struggle in the beginning but it’s important to never give up and set your mind on what you want.” I also wrote how this was related to the main character: “Just like [him], I knew in order to do well in college I had to change a lot of things in my life and focus on my studies.” When I finally handed in the third draft, the professor gave these comments: “some improvements noted” but I still needed to “work on paragraph organization.” And, this time, I understood what he was saying.
It is not easy doing something you are fearful of, but it feels good to be able to have a different outlook once you finish. I was happy to learn what a thesis was in my first essay assignment. I also learned to ask for help because the end result was the best result. I was ashamed to ask for help at the beginning, but I did not let what I felt inside stop me from getting the help I needed. I did the same for the math class I was taking. I went to the professor’s additional tutoring hour. He invited the whole class to go, but I was the only one who took advantage of it, and this became a one-on-one tutoring. I also spent many more hours at home studying, and even my daughter said I was racking my brain. I didn’t like to read or write, but after my college writing course, reading isn’t bad after all. As I wrote in my essay, “I’m hoping like [the main character], my hard work will pay off and I’ll get good grades at the end of my semester.”
Hard work has indeed paid off. After over two years of studying, and after overcoming the challenges of taking classes online during the pandemic, I am about to graduate from LaGuardia. So, it is never too late to go back to school if you are focused and determined.
For many years, at conferences and workshops, I found myself in a corner with one or two other people saying, “You don’t understand. Community college is different.”
For too many people, “different” means “less.” High school warmed over. Those poor kids who can’t afford to go to a real college. Those people with jobs who just want to get degrees and don’t really have time to study.
NO. Community college is different. It’s for the community that surrounds it–or ought to be. As these stories show, one solid reason for community colleges is to allow people who didn’t go to college right out of high school a chance to go to college–for any reason.
The community colleges I’ve worked in had extraordinary services for the students they served. At one, the head of the office for students with disabilities was hired to run the same office at a major world-famous university because our office’s services were so good. At another, I helped run the Center for READING and Writing–my emphasis is there because we really did help with reading. We trained peer tutors to assist with reading, writing, and study skills. When the tutors transferred to four-year schools, they got tutoring jobs immediately because our center was so well known.
Community colleges are for veterans. They are for students who aren’t sure if they want college; they can try without taking on huge debt and burdens. They are for students who do want college, but for some reason want to stay at home–security, money, whatever.
When I registered people like those in these stories, they would say, “I don’t know if I can do this. All those young kids–I haven’t been in school in 10 (20, 30) years,” and I would say, “When you walk in that classroom, the teacher is going to say, ‘Oh, good. One of those wonderful older women returning to college.'”
People with goals. People with determination. People used to juggling far too many things. People I’d want to hire.
“Success”: what does this mean? Four of the most successful students I taught dropped out. Three went to trade schools, graduated, and are grateful for good jobs. They know they can go to college, and they know they chose not to, and they know they can come back. The other told me he realized he’d always hated school and left to pursue dreams, wishing me “peace, love, God, and curiosity.”
Community colleges are changing in unfortunate ways. These stories show that students need many kinds of support and encouragment. Now they get pressured to finish “on time”–not their time, but some arbitrary time. Two years. They get pushed into registering for five courses, drop or fail three, use up financial aid money, get discouraged. One student refused. “No more than two,” she said. “I work. I have kids.” She got As in the courses.
A college where I worked build dorms and began recruiting deeply under-prepared students from cities. The college was rural. The dorms were in an isolated area, no public transportation, on a notorious drug route. And the administration was surprised they had problems. They no longer served the community. A good community, that needed services, but came into conflict with the city students.
A former student recently contacted me about a family tragedy, and I thought, “I need to talk to the counselor I team taught with; she knows the social structure in the area; she knows the support services; she knows this student.” The counselor has retired, and I’m glad for her, but the community has been deprived of her services.
I taught an older student with health problems, from a poor background, dyslexic, functionally illiterate, who tried and tried and tried and never gave up. One day I said to her, “We should make a poster of you,” and she said, “Why?”
“Because,” I said, “you are such a wonderful student. You never give up.”
She shrugged. “I knew I wouldn’t graduate from college reading the way I did when I came in here,” she said.
Yes, she graduated. And when her son was born she told me the first thing she said to him was, “You’re going to college.”
I wish they had had what they should have had in kindergarten, in primary school, in secondary school. But community colleges that admit students should be prepared to give them what they need to succeed.
I’m a retired community college teacher, teaching reading, writing, literature, and humanities courses for 25 years.