Access to Education

Keith Lofton

I think it was important for my dad and for my mom for me to go to college because they didn’t have that opportunity and they knew that they didn’t want the same thing that they were living through to be my reality.

I was in sixth grade and I had the opportunity to be a part of the Young Scholars program. The program was to send students who had never had a chance to go to college, to Ohio State. And, as a sixth grader I wasn’t thinking about that, but my father thought it was a good idea, thought it was good for me and for the family, actually, so I became a Young Scholar and it wasn’t until tenth grade that I really started to like this. It was an epiphany. I knew that this is where I was supposed to be and it was maybe in tenth grade that I knew that this is what I was supposed to do.

I did suffer some summers coming in, because I had an academic camp to go to and you don’t want to tell your friends you’re going to an academic camp so you can’t play football. So that’s what happened: I suffered, but then I realized it was good for me in the end.

It was a blessing, and I was able to have four years here, paid by the university, and it was all because of my father’s vision for me back in ’89.

I was ending my sophomore year when my son Tyler came about and he really was the motivator for me. There were a lot of people who said, “Go back home and take care of your responsibilities,” and I could have done that, I would have left what was given to me here at Ohio State—an academic scholarship—and gone home to work, maybe the same thing my father was doing if he could’ve gotten me a job in the factory or could’ve helped me out by letting me be a security guard with him, but that would have limited me so much, so this was a sacrifice I had to make. Those two years were rough but I was able to get my degree and now I’m back home, doing what I needed to do.

To graduate on the Oval at Ohio State, first class in 60-some odd years, I guess, to do that. It was emotional. It was really good because I did something for my family. I was the first male in my family to ever graduate. They had high aspirations for me. That was just a little bit, right there, just to have that moment and to have that graduation and everybody there, to say that, “Wow I did it.”