Getting a college degree was their dream. Then their school suddenly closed – The Hechinger Report
The coronavirus has thrown many colleges into financial crisis. Some students soon could experience the pain that hit Detroit’s Marygrove College community
DETROIT — Three years later, Michael Stone can still picture the pride he would have seen on his mother’s face as he sat down at the piano for his senior recital at Marygrove College.
He can still imagine his little brothers and sisters — all 15 of them — watching with admiration as he played that capstone performance. It would have marked the completion of his music degree and celebrated his arrival as the first college graduate in his family.
“I was so pumped about senior recital and my bachelor’s,” said Stone, 27, who noted that some of his siblings had expressed interest in college because they’d seen their big brother’s success. “It was getting ready to happen.”
But then on Aug. 9, 2017 — just weeks before Stone was to begin his senior year at the small Roman Catholic college in northwest Detroit — he got an urgent call from a friend telling him to check the college’s website.