Being on a 7:00am Sunday morning flight back to school means one thing: sleep on the plane. When I got to my seat I put in my headphones and started to drift into dreamland, until a black man looking like he was in his teens bumped me with his bag. He apologized and him and his mother sat next to me. Behind me, was sitting a mother, daughter, and father from Canton, Ohio. I have never seen more social or happy people in my life. The black mother and son sitting next to me started talking about the college visit that they just went on. The black boy, named Jared was 17, a junior in high school from a small town in Ohio and was looking to play basketball at a college in Florida. Immediately when Jared started talking about his college visit, the people sitting behind us jumped in saying that their daughter Melanie, was also looking to play college softball.

Once this all unraveled I realized that I had to take out my iPod and listen because this completely relates to what we were learning about first hand in class about racial inequalities and the college process. Melanie went to a high school in Canton, Ohio where the grade size was approximately 400 a person and they received a decent amount of college information. The school provided classes for SAT prep. Jared on the other hand, was in a graduating class of around 1,200 with little college help and no one on one attention. Comparing Melanie and Jared to myself, I went to a high school where my graduating class was around 200 people. I had private SAT tutors, and a college and career center at school where different colleges from all over the country would come and give a brief summary of what their school is all about. Here, sitting in two rows on an airplane at 7am were 3 different students with three different backgrounds and three very different college opportunities.

Being that I just learned and took a test on all of the inequalities with the college admissions process, I asked Jared to explain his story. Jared said that his only shot in going to a good college was through playing basketball. He was saying how a few division 3 schools were recruiting him. After saying how he was being recruited he explained that as passionate as he is about basketball, he likes it as an extra curricular activity and isn’t sure that he wants to devote all his time to playing in college. His father and mother both didn’t go to college so he feels the pressure to go. He says that basketball is his ticket in and if not he will, “never leave his small town.”

Is this fair? That Jared needs to make a huge sacrifice and commitment to a college sport just to get into college. This situation supports that racial inequalities do stem from money matters and socioeconomic factors. He said that he did very poorly on the SATs and is GPA is around average. Melanie said that the schools she went too, she was in SAT and GPA range for both and that the softball will give her an extra advantage when applying. Melanie and Jared come from the same state, and their education is so different. Jared’s school had outdated textbooks, and Melanie’s had top of the line technology. Jared is making a huge commitment to play college ball, while Melanie actually wants to play softball and can probably get into the colleges with her boards and GPA alone. I did encourage Jared that colleges are starting to take more under qualified males due to less males applying to college creating a widening gender gap. He laughed, and I said I was just giving him the facts. I mean I doubt the gender gap would play that large of a roll but it could help.