A former teen mother who put herself through college with her three-month-old daughter in tow, Nicole Lynn Lewis now works every day to open doors to higher education for student parents.

In this interview, Lewis describes how the organization she founded, Generation Hope, is expanding its work nationally to help colleges and policymakers better meet the needs of the nearly 4 million parenting students who are working toward their degrees.

Illustration: The Chronicle

As Temple University's 12th president, Jason Wingard cast himself as a higher-education reformer, someone committed to making college a place less focused on pure scholarship and more concerned with training students for a new and often uncertain labor market.

But after less than two years on the job, Temple's first Black president is gone.

As a first-generation student entering Olive-Harvey College at the height of the pandemic, Stephanie Meeks needed all the support she could find. Meeks got lucky, learning about the One Million Degrees program from a high school guidance counselor. 

Now, students don’t have to rely on luck to secure the resources and wraparound supports that Meeks had. Through a partnership between the nonprofit and the City Colleges of Chicago, new and re-enrolling degree-seeking students will be automatically accepted into the OMD program.