50 Years Later, TRIO Programs Paving Pathways to Success - Higher Education

50 Years Later, TRIO Programs Paving Pathways to Success - Higher Education: WASHINGTON — At the age of six or seven — long before she became a college chancellor — Cynthia Azari got a tough lesson in economics for migrant farm worker families such as hers.

She and her sister had just dragged a bag full of cotton that they had been picking all day to place it on the scale. A grower told them that they had only earned 85 cents for their labor. This was before, she said, child labor laws protected the children of migrant farm workers.

“That probably could buy a loaf of bread and eggs and a quart of milk, but as a child I thought: I can’t do this,’” Azari said, recounting the years when she and her family lived in small shacks picking cotton and grapes in Texas and California. “There was no way I was going to work like this for the rest of my life.”