About four years ago, Asha-Le Davis sat in the Anthony J. Drexel Picture Gallery, the Drexel family’s portraits looking on. She was waiting to interview for an opportunity that would change her life.
On April 25, she was back in the picture gallery. But she was standing, speaking to a room full of jubilant students, families and Drexel officials. Surrounded by Drexel history on the walls, she remembered the moment that came after her interview four years back: when the envelope came in the mail telling her she’d be part of Drexel’s first class of Liberty Scholars.
[box ]Four years ago, Mayor Michael Nutter challenged local universities to help double the city’s percentage of college-educated residents — and Drexel responded. Today, about 200 disadvantaged Philadelphia high school graduates attend Drexel on full scholarships, and this year the first group graduated. [/box]
“I cried,” Davis recalls, “because that dream that just a few months ago I didn’t think would be a reality was now coming to fruition.”
In 2010, Drexel announced a new scholarship program: the Drexel Liberty Scholars. The University began awarding 50 full scholarships each year to academically talented Philadelphia high school students from disadvantaged backgrounds. This summer, the first cohort of 16 accepted their diplomas.
At a special dinner event in April, the University celebrated the Scholars’ achievements and the success of a program that’s as strongly connected to Drexel’s founder as are the portraits hanging on the walls of the picture gallery.
“The Liberty Scholars program really, in the end, represents the essence of why Drexel was founded in 1891,” President John Fry told a smiling crowd of Liberty Scholars, their families, their mentors and other Drexel officials. A.J. Drexel founded his University, Fry explained, so that hard-working bright Philadelphians could have access to a great education, regardless of their financial resources.
“There’s not enough thanks,” says Milane Shoukri, the mother of two of the scholars graduating this year. She raised her twin daughters, Guovanna and Sylvia Shoukri, as a single mother in South Philadelphia, and she feared she wouldn’t be able to send them to college.
But then, near the end of her senior year of high school, Guovanna out she would be a Liberty Scholar. And a few days later, Sylvia learned she would be one too. “When it seemed impossible, this made it possible,” Guovanna says.
The sisters both studied biology, and now they both have the same post-graduation plan: to earn doctorates and become nurse practitioners. Without the Liberty Scholars program, they say, things would have been different.
“We wouldn’t have gotten the experiences that we’ve gotten, and wouldn’t have been able to make the connections with professionals that we’ve made,” Sylvia says.
Not only that, but they also took a burden off their mother’s shoulders. Guovanna remembered watching her mother cry as a television station interviewed her and her sister about the scholarship four years ago. “I would pay a million dollars to see that over again,” she says.