Academically, Craig Drayden was a late bloomer. He earned his first two college degrees — associate degrees in Business Administration and Management from Richland College — when he was 36. After that, nothing could stop him.
After Richland, he earned a bachelor’s degree on scholarship in just one more year from the University of North Texas. Today, he’s earning dual graduate-level degrees in health care administration and public health through distance learning from Des Moines University College of Health Sciences.
“Nobody in my family ever finished college,” he says. “I thought college was only for smart people, and I didn’t consider myself very smart. I went to work in a factory straight out of high school, working as a bindery assistant for several years. I thought I was making good money since I worked seven days a week and got overtime pay.
“But when they began cutting back hours and my finances got tight, I had nothing to stay afloat and I didn’t know what to do. It was humiliating to see my name on a welfare card, even though that was only for about three months. I also worked as a truck driver and as an EKG technician at a hospital. I then was laid off from a job as a health care administrator at EDS.
“One day, I got this letter from Richland College about a new support group, the African-American and Latino Male Student Alliance, and I went out of curiosity. I had nothing to lose — and what I found was a strong support system. I started college surrounded by others who wanted a similar outcome: to figure out how to succeed in something we didn’t know how to do. We started networking and found that by combining all of our strengths, we could cover each other’s deficits. It was like finding a group of brothers.
“In the past, I had had a pattern of getting frustrated and quitting things that I couldn’t succeed in. But with this group, I found that we could create our own pattern of success. That’s not to say college was easy for me; it wasn’t. I never thought I was smart, but I did come to find that I was ambitious. And I just kept asking questions: How do you finish school? How do you get the support you need? And I found mentors and brothers who answered those questions.
“Richland College was like home to me. It’s where I became anchored, because someone went the extra mile for me to make sure I was a success.”
For Craig Drayden, it all began here.