When Bryant L. George first started work as an admissions officer at his alma mater — Madonna University in Livonia, Michigan — back in 2010, he began to ask why so few young African-American men such as himself enrolled in the school.
During a three-year period from 2008 to 2011, for instance, 64 African-American male students applied to the university and 24 were admitted, but only one ultimately enrolled. And that one did not hail from George’s nearby hometown of Detroit.
“Why is that when we are 15 minutes west of Detroit?” George recalled thinking at the time.
It would be easy to look at the poor educational outcomes in Detroit — which has the lowest high school graduation rate for Black males in the country at 20 percent — and conclude that the public school system there is simply failing to produce enough Black male students who are ready for college.
George recalls feeling ill-prepared for college himself when he graduated from Northwestern High School in Detroit in 2006. Born to a teenage mother and a father who struggled with drug addiction, George had an unremarkable GPA of 2.8, a low ACT score of 14 and no firm college plans when he graduated from high school.
“By paper, I should not have gotten into college,” George says.
Today, at 27 years old, George uses his experience as one who beat the odds for young Black men from Detroit’s public schools to smoothen the path to higher education for other young Black men from his hometown.
