PBS News traveled to Questa to highlight inequity in opportunities for students to attend college. Stephanie Sy, the PBS reporter, traveled with various college recruiters for a college fair at the school.
In her reporting, she spoke with various organizations, school counselor Brian Salazar, student Santiago DeHerrera, teacher Gregory Rael, and student Janae Dominguez.
“These kids haven’t had the exposure that there’s opportunity out there,” Questa counselor Brian Salazar said.
Student Janae Dominguez said, “My mom is actually really excited for me to go to college, because she didn’t go to college. I would be the first gen to even go to college.” Dominguez continued, “Whenever I think about college, I think about tuition. So I think about in-state college. I feel like it would also be hard to leave New Mexico because I have never been far away from my family, to just start a new chapter in your life and go away from everything that you have known. I hope that I could provide more, not that my mom doesn’t provide, but I just think I want to be able to provide for myself and future kids. I want them to be able to not have to worry.”
Sy interviewed various specialists and scholarship organizations including Hanna Negishi Levin with Davis New Mexico Scholarship. She said, “It’s difficult to get here. It’s difficult to leave here. Culturally, this is a very specific and singular state. And leaving New Mexico for any first-gen student, any low-income student often means you’re the first in your family to go and experience something that is new, where the community looks really different.”
Questa teacher Gregory Rael said, “We have a lot of students who stayed within our community who — where the college path may not have been the path for them. And so we want to just build that next set of traditions for a lot of our students that a four-year university or a college degree is something to strive for and is something to value.”
Stephanie Sy is a PBS News Hour correspondent and serves as anchor of PBS News Hour West. Throughout her career, she served in anchor and correspondent capacities for ABC News, Al Jazeera America, CBSN, CNN International, and PBS News Hour Weekend. Prior to joining NewsHour, she was with Yahoo News where she anchored coverage of the 2018 Midterm Elections and reported from Donald Trump’s victory party on Election Day 2016.
The report ran on PBS News Hour, which has an estimated 2.7 million viewers nightly and 8 million viewers in the course of a week. The story aired on Monday, October 14, 2024.
It is available for viewing online here: https://tinyurl.com/yz3u57ee
