Mama Mae is a butterfly

One of the best things about covering education is getting to know people who let nothing get in their way of getting a degree.  In this case, not heart attacks or strokes or the passage of decades. The non-traditional students I interviewed for this story were determined to graduate, no matter what it takes.

Back in the classroom with life on the transcript
By Monica Rhor | September 30, 2012

With one hand, the woman known as Mama Mae leaned on a cane decorated with butterflies and, with the other, cradled a white taper candle with a flickering flame.

The journey to this moment had been difficult, littered with tacks and splinters and rutted roads. There was the stroke and aneurysm in 2004, the heart attack in 2011, the battle to walk again, to talk again, to get out of the house and back into the world.

“I’m a butterfly,” said Mae Dow, smiling proudly.

And so she is. A Texas Southern University junior at 56, Dow is remaking her life.

Just like a growing number of nontraditional students in college classrooms and campuses.

They include TSU students like Robert O. Strickland, a dapper 54-year-old man wearing a crisp white shirt and a tantalizing touch of cologne. Nicknamed “Old School” by his younger classmates, Strickland went back to college after a quarter-century break.

Like Novella Bean, a 45-year-old real estate agent inspired to study social work after caring for a mother disabled by a stroke. Like Carolyn Hancock, who dropped out of TSU 50 years ago and returned this semester, two months shy of her 70th birthday.

At TSU alone, about 2,000 students are back in school years or even decades after last setting foot in a classroom. They have served in the military, spent years in the workforce, crossed into retirement, been laid off, been married, been divorced, raised children and run businesses.

To read the entire article, click here.