|
Center for Social Policy
McCormack Graduate School
University of Massachusetts Boston
100 Morrissey Blvd.
Boston, MA 02125-3393
Phone: (617) 287 5550
Fax: (617) 287 5544
|
| back to Press index page |
| |
| From Harvard to homeless: Degree no
guarantee today |
Author(s):
Kay Lazar
Source(s):
Boston Herald, page 20
Date: November 10, 2003
|
With his bifocals, rich vocabulary and impressive stack of reading material, Morton Thomas could
be taken for an academic. Indeed, the 61-year-old is a Harvard grad, cum laude, and a former
lawyer.
He is also is a recent resident of a homeless shelter in Boston.
"I'm sure most people would be surprised," said Thomas, who now lives in subsidized senior
housing in the city's South End.
Yet academic credentials like Thomas's are becoming more common among adults in the state's
emergency shelter system.
A recent survey by the Center for Social Policy at UMass-Boston found the percentage of shelter
residents with a high school diploma jumped from 56 percent to 73 percent between 1999 and the
end of 2002. Those with a college degree increased from 6 percent to 9 percent - nearly one in
10 residents.
"It's the economy," said Macy DeLong, co-founder of Solutions at Work, a Cambridge-based
nonprofit that provides services and job training for the homeless.
"There was a vice president of a dot-com living in a homeless shelter and she had a college
degree," said DeLong, who gave the woman a bed in her own home one night when the shelters were
full.
DeLong and other homeless advocates say the lousy economy and scarcity of jobs have been final
nails in the coffin for many, who already are struggling with the state's chronic hurdles -
lack of affordable housing and the dismantling of mental health and substance abuse prevention
programs.
"The difficulty is, when you have a college degree, you walk into a Stop & Shop, and unless
you lie on your application, they won't hire you. You are overqualified," said DeLong.
"We have folks who have different resumes," DeLong said. "One that includes their education,
one that doesn't."
Thomas, who was in the shelter system from 1999 until 2002, did not list his education when he
applied for a job at Stop & Shop, where he has worked part time for the past three years.
Growing up in suburban Philadelphia in a Harvard-educated family, Thomas attended private school,
ran track and went on to Harvard, where he worked on the landmark Mississippi Project, helping
blacks to register to vote in the deep South. He graduated with a law degree from the
University of Pennsylvania and practiced law for a few years before depression and then
alcoholism took over.
Sober since 1989, Thomas has dreamed about using his legal skills again while working a
variety of other jobs - telemarketing research and cab driving. "If you start from scratch, you
start behind the eight ball," Thomas said about moving to Boston in 1999 and running into high
housing costs and the recession.
While in the shelter system, Thomas volunteered as a legal aide at a Cambridge nonprofit. Now
on Social Security disability, Thomas is determined to volunteer his legal skills again. For
other college-educated residents still in the state's shelter system, experts say the economic
outlook is grim.
"What we are facing is another year that looks as bleak, if not bleaker, than the year we are
coming out of," said Leslie Lawrence of the Massachusetts Coalition for the Homeless.
|
|
