Low-Income Students Count on Finding Jobs. But the Pandemic Has Halted Their Job Training. – The Chronicle of Higher Education
Danielle Jones was less than two months away, she thought, from a degree as a dental hygienist and a license to practice. A few more weeks of scraping tartar and calming jittery patients in Amarillo College’s dentistry clinic, and she’d be starting a career that would alleviate the financial stresses that have weighed heavily on the single mother of three.
Covid-19 seemed a distant threat in Amarillo, a rugged city in the Texas Panhandle, hundreds of miles from the state’s major population centers. Then, on March 21, the pandemic hit home. The clinic’s coordinator emailed that a few cases of the virus had cropped up locally, so the clinic was heeding government warnings and sending students home for at least 30 days.
As four weeks became six, Jones began to panic. She had planned her schedule carefully so that she’d complete the clinical hours required for her license by mid-April. Both licensing exams — one practice-based and one written — have been postponed, and her graduation, which had been scheduled for May 15, is now uncertain.
Jones, who has been living off financial aid and student loans, has enough money to last through May. “I don’t know when we’re graduating. I don’t know when we’re even coming back,” she said. “It just totally blindsided me. I didn’t have a backup plan.”