Darrius Sloan, 17, talks about his dreams — about himself — in the past tense. He hoped to go to the University of Arizona. "I wanted to be a civil engineer," he says. "I really loved math, I really did. I really do, I mean." Raised on Navajo land in Tuba City, Ariz., in a trailer with 13 other family members, Mr. Sloan got good grades and earned a spot in a boardinghouse for Native Americans to attend high school in Flagstaff, about 80 miles from the broken schools of home. He blossomed there — the kid who carried around a journal full of quotations from famous thinkers, who knocked out a year’s worth of credits at the local community college, who toured the University of Arizona as a sophomore and bought a gray jacket emblazoned with its name. But his grandparents and siblings, back on the reservation with no electricity or hot water, subsisting on little more than potatoes, tugged at his heart until he made a weighty decision late last year.

January 17, 2016 ・ From Chronicle of Higher Education