Michael Phelps Jr., 18, and his mother, April Bumbrey, are welcomed at Penn State Schuylkill by the mascot, the Nittany Lion.
SCHUYLKILL HAVEN, Pa. — When Michael Phelps Jr. told a college adviser once that he wanted to go to Penn State University, he was told his goal “wasn’t realistic” because of his grades. The adviser said Phelps should apply to more “safety schools” to shore up his chances of getting into college.
That may have been sound advice. But the other day, 18-year-old Phelps dispelled any notion that he would never set foot on a Penn State campus as a student.
Waking up before dawn, Phelps and his mother hopped in a rented Chrysler and made the three-hour road trip from their apartment in Southeast Washington, D.C., to move Phelps into a first-floor dorm room of a residence hall named after the Penn State mascot—the Nittany Lion—here at Penn State Schuylkill.
The scene was just one of many that played out at college campuses across the nation this past weekend as students settled in to begin the 2014-2015 school year, which starts this week.
The serene campus at Penn State Schuylkill—which sits in the midst of rustic barns and foggy, tree-covered mountains here in this historic, 18th-century town known as “The Little Town That Could”—is a far cry from Phelps’s home in Ward 8 in Southeast D.C. Ward 8 is an area of the nation’s capital known for high rates of poverty and crime and low rates of high school graduation—33 percent by some counts and even lower for young men—and low rates of college completion.
The area is so violent that Phelps says he never went outside there as a child to play or socialize.
“I never hang out in that neighborhood,” Phelps told Diverse. “It’s just dangerous in general.”
