Bad college grades a tough record to shake
- December 25, 2010
If you were to design the perfect nurse, Alicia Powell might be your model. Caring and smart, the 37-year-old student especially bonds with the elderly. The more forgetful or cranky they are, the wider her heart opens.
Excited to become a nurse after years as a caregiver, Powell earned A's in her toughest courses at City College of San Francisco: anatomy, physiology, chemistry.
But ÂãÁÄÖ±²¥ denied her entry for a year before admitting her this fall. An A student there as well, Powell still has little hope of qualifying for a nursing program: She's haunted by the ghosts of bad grades past. Her story is a cautionary tale for college students that can be summarized in three words:
"Don't screw up."
Parents and advisers have hammered at this idea for generations. But at 18, who listens?
'Academic hole'
"We try to make this one of our biggest, loudest messages," said Sally Murphy, director of general education and freshman programs at ÂãÁÄÖ±²¥ in Hayward. "The grades you get in freshman year will follow you all your life. Students need to make sure they don't dig an academic hole they can't get out of."
That's what happened to Powell.
In 1990, she was a new puppy of a teenager at Fordham University in New York City.
"I was just very young and really energetic," she said. She'd hoped to take a year off and travel, but her dad said no.
Soon, the obedient girl from Pennsylvania had traded her upright ways for those of a college partier: drinking, smoking, clubbing - and punctuating it all with occasional visits to class.
In three years at Fordham, Powell earned five Fs, four Ds and enough low marks for a grade-point average of 1.5, a D.
"I begged and begged the dean not to kick me out, but she was like, 'Noooo," Powell said with a chuckle. "I was mad, but she was right."
Powell spent the rest of the '90s expressing her inner hippie.
She took off after the Grateful Dead, selling soda, cigarettes and ice cream at their shows. It proved lucrative until Jerry Garcia's death in 1995 shut things down.
Then she stuck out her thumb and crisscrossed the country in the cars of strangers. She sold her crochet work and grew malnourished on a vegan diet.
"I was young and stupid," she admitted.
Change in 2000
Everything changed in 2000, when Powell met an old man in Vermont whose dementia kept driving caregivers away.
"I fell in love with Lou and fell in love with the work," she said. "I seem to have a knack with people in this state. They still have so much to offer if they have the right care."
Powell had much to offer, too. After Lou died, she cared for Alice and Mabel in Oakland, and then her grandmother in Pennsylvania.
But she wanted to do more. So, in spring 2009, she enrolled in an anatomy class at City College. Emboldened by her first A, she applied to rural Humboldt State University.
She was rejected.
"I was shocked," she said, not realizing that her Fordham grades would count. The rejection woke her up: She had become her GPA.
To enter a state college, students need at least a 2.0, or C. For pre-nursing, it's 2.5. Powell's was 1.7.
Public universities say that limited space and low funding force them to be strict about grades in fairness to other applicants and taxpayers. Once admitted, students are moved through school as quickly as possible, said Mike Uhlenkamp, a CSU spokesman.
To facilitate that, students may repeat classes just twice. CSU may also disregard up to one year of earlier coursework - but only if graduating is at stake.
Powell had assumed she could start fresh.
"My previous grades do not reflect the student that I am today," she said. "Why do we need to keep the stigma of bad grades with you for life? Why are we not able to learn from our mistakes and move forward with an education?"
Her grades also disqualify her for key grants and scholarships.
By summer's end in 2009, Powell had earned four more A's at City College, in chemistry, psychology, weaving and ballet. That raised her GPA to a frustrating 1.9 - a tenth of a point too low for CSU.
That fall she studied at City College and at Merritt College in Oakland, collecting A's in physiology, anatomy and microbiology, and a B in speech.
Even straight A's would have raised her GPA by just 0.2. And things were about to get worse.
Sharing a ride back to Pennsylvania for Christmas last year, Powell was asleep in the backseat when her car slammed into a stalled car on a dark Tennessee highway.
She broke her neck, back and vertebrae.
"I'm pretty damn lucky," she said. She wasn't paralyzed.
Powell spent spring semester in recovery - good for the body, but not the academic record.
Still, her work before the accident brought her GPA to 2.1, and Humboldt accepted her at last.
If she gets all A's this semester and next, she'll qualify for pre-nursing next fall - except that Humboldt just canceled its program.
Serious lesson
"The only take-away life lesson is to be serious from the time you hit school," said Jo Volkert, head of enrollment at San Francisco State.
Volkert rattled off a list of majors so popular that San Francisco State routinely turns away students because of blemishes on their record: nursing, psychology, dietetics and journalism among them.
Meanwhile, Powell hopes to qualify for financial aid at a private school in Oregon. Her experience as a patient only strengthened her wish to be a nurse, but she's having doubts it will ever be possible.
"I wasted a free, private school education," she said. "The walls are starting to become a little too high to climb."
Read more: