“Once I finished high school, I was so elated. It was as if someone cracked the door open, and I ran in.” That’s how David Fowles describes the effect of earning his high school diploma through the Adult High School program at in Durham Technical Community College in Durham, NC. After dropping out of high school, he had worked at a series of jobs, got in trouble with the law and even briefly served jail time. But his success in this Durham Tech high school program gave him the confidence to enroll in the college’s curriculum program.

Still, Fowles is convinced he would not have stayed in college had it not been for two support programs offered at Durham Tech. He participated in the college’s mentoring program, which matches incoming students with second-year students who help them with their studies and provide advice, and in the Minority Male Mentoring Program, begun in 2004 as part of the college’s Achieving the Dream initiative. This tightly knit group helps male students of color, a group with a traditionally high dropout rate, succeed in college.

“There was always someone to go to,” he says of the mentoring programs. “I never felt I was in this alone. I learned to set a goal and not to give up on myself.”

Today, David Fowles, 32, is a junior at North Carolina Central University in Durham, working toward a bachelor’s degree in communications with plans to work in journalism.