Symposium Speaker Applauds Higher-Education Community for Unlocking Students’ Purpose and Potential

When Bertice Berry was in high school, one teacher told her she wasn’t college material.

Fortunately for Berry, a different teacher thought otherwise. Berry, a noted author, motivational speaker, sociologist and educator, went on to graduate magna cum laude from Jacksonville University in Florida and earned a doctoral degree in sociology from Kent State University at age 26.

Berry recently addressed the minority-serving-institution administrators, faculty and student-services and financial-aid professionals at the USA Funds^® Symposium “Pursuing Excellence in Student Preparation, Access and Success.”

“You are changing the entire world completely and forever with what you do each day,” Berry told the more than 160 administrators representing Tribal Colleges, Historically Black Colleges and Universities and Hispanic-Serving Institutions.
 
“Sometimes all you need to succeed is to turn the knob and open the door,” Berry said. By helping enhance financial access to higher education, she noted, USA Funds helps hold that door open for many people. “It’s all the criteria some folks need — once they get there they can make it.”

Berry’s own story seems to bear that out. She grew up in Wilmington, Del., as the sixth child of seven in a household headed by a single mother. She remembers a high-school teacher who actually graded the homework Berry had wadded up. “She gave it back to me,” Berry recalled, “and I said, ‘What’s this?’ — and she said it was an A-minus, ‘and it would have been an A-plus if you hadn’t thrown it at me.’

“That teacher got me on track to go to college.”

With the help of that high-school teacher and a counselor, Berry applied to go to college without any idea how she would pay for her education. The morning Jacksonville University’s admissions office received her application, a wealthy benefactor called the school. The caller was seeking to sponsor a student who could make it if that student had the right backing, but who might fail without that support.

“This is what I mean when I say ‘When you walk with destiny, you collide with purpose,’” Berry said.

Berry calls ignorance, poverty and lack of education “the new slavery,” and she applauded higher-education professionals everywhere for working to help students gain access to a college education.

She recounted a story about a time when her 6-year-old daughter asked her what an abolitionist was. Berry told the child that an abolitionist was someone who during slavery fought to free slaves and didn’t stop until all slaves were free, because until they were all free, no one was free. The little girl then told Berry she knew many “abolitionists” at her school — including the teacher, principal and bus driver — because, her daughter told her, “they set my mind free.”

Berry encouraged symposium attendees to remember the impact that their work can have on their students. “Your population has all survived something. They’ve made it to the door and turned the knob,” Berry said.

And each student’s story is the beginning of a book, she said. “You help to unlock the purpose in each person.”