What Happened to All Our College Graduates?

Hezel, Francis X. (2008-02-01). [www.micsem.org What Happened to All Our College Graduates?]. Micronesian Counselor (Report). Kolonia, Pohnpei: Micronesian Seminar. pp. 1–10.

• Has attachment: File:EBWIJL29.pdf

Abstract: There was a time when US colleges were awash in Micronesian students. Well, perhaps that's a bit of an exaggeration. But we can say that thirty-some years ago the Air Mike flights late each summer carried off hundreds of Micronesian students, many of whom had never left their island before, to their college of choice.

Terry Edvalson, the scholarship officer on Saipan at the time, told me once that he estimated there were close to 2,000 young people from the Trust Territory attending college in the US. He wasn't sure exactly how many, because then as now there was no reliable tracking system for those who went off to pursue college studies. Those were the heady years after Micronesians were made eligible for the Pell Grant (then known as the Basic Education Opportunity Grant). At that time I was in Chuuk serving as director of Xavier High School. I can still recall how astonished I was to hear that Truk High School, our worthy sports rivals but never our equals in academic pursuits, was sending off 189 students from the Class of 1976, fully 60 percent of their graduating class, to attend college. These Chuukese graduates had plenty of company; 260 more from other parts of Micronesia joined them that year. These 450 young men and women were heading for college abroad, most of them to the mainland US. They were a single year's outflow from the islands into the pool of young college students that was expanding by the year. A few years later, in 1978, there were more than 600 Chuukese alone attending college, two-thirds of them studying in the US. This was the height of the Micronesian exodus to college, a time when about 2,000 Micronesians were abroad in college. They attended Suomi, Navarro, Park College, and ended up in towns like LaGrande, Slippery In any given year during the late 1960s there were a total of 40 Chuukese attending college, while ten years later there were 600 in college....