Power of PEF: From Germantown to College President
PhillyGoes2College is Powered by the Philadelphia Education Fund, which is celebrating 40 years of supporting students this year. In the weeks leading up to PEF’s June 4 Anniversary Gala, we’ll be sharing stories highlighting its power and impact in empowering Philadelphia students to pursue postsecondary success!
We caught up with Dr. Irvin Clark recently. He told us he had gotten chills on a plane that morning, thinking about Philadelphia. About a group of people who, thirty years back, kept coming up to his college campus just to sit with him and make sure he was okay.
Those people worked for the Philadelphia Education Fund.
Dr. Clark is a proud graduate of Germantown High School, Class of 1994. From there he went to Cheyney University of Pennsylvania, the oldest HBCU in the country, and earned a bachelor’s degree in 1998 and a master’s in 2001. Then a doctorate in higher education from Morgan State University, with a concentration in community college leadership. Today he is the president of Southern Crescent Technical College in Georgia. He is responsible for 14,000 students. He has worked in higher education for 25 years.
None of it was supposed to happen. He will tell you that himself.
Rewind to Germantown High School. Clark was a kid who had never been outside of Philadelphia, and no one in his family had gone to college. PEF’s College Access Program counselors took him on his first college visits. They taught him what the FAFSA was. They taught him words he had never heard, registrar, bursar, the vocabulary of a place he was not sure he belonged.
Then the barrier came. The FAFSA needed his parents’ personal information, and his parents did not understand the form and did not want to hand that information over. Clark was devastated. He walked into his counselor’s office and said the sentence that could have ended the whole story. “I am not going to go to college. I’m just going to go work.”
The counselor did not accept it. “Absolutely not,” he told Clark. “I’m going to call your parents. We are going to find a way to get you in college.” He drove to Clark’s house and sat with Clark’s father for about two hours. This was a counselor working with around 70 students. He went to one house anyway.
The next morning, Clark’s father left the FAFSA form on his dresser.
“It was the best feeling in the world, because I knew that that opportunity to go to college was for real.” Clark got off the J bus after school, ran to the College Access Program office, and handed the form in. “I’m going to college.”
The Last Dollar Scholarship took it from there. PEF gave him the check before the school year started, so the money was in hand at registration. “That was the difference with me staying in school.” The counselors did not stop at the city line either. They drove up to Cheyney to check on him, sat him down with other students facing the same things, and celebrated the wins through graduation.
Thirty years later, Dr. Clark runs a college. He is the one now responsible for making sure 14,000 students can get in, earn a credential, and walk into a career. He tells his version of the FAFSA story to students all the time, especially the ones who are the first in their families to go to college, standing exactly where he stood.
“If I can do it, anybody can do it.”
A counselor who would not take no for an answer turned a kid from Germantown into a college president. That is the power of PEF.
PEF’s Last Dollar Scholarship is open through July 8, 2026 at 5pm for seniors in the College Access Program at Bartram, Frankford, Furness, Kensington Creative & Performing Arts, Olney, and Roxborough High Schools. APPLY HERE
