Six years before she climbed the steps of Jones Hall during the fall semester of her senior year at the University of Puget Sound — a bullhorn in hand and a list of a dozen demands for how the university should change — Rachel Askew didn’t even know the university existed.
“I had never heard of it,” Rachel says, recalling what she knew of the university during her junior year in high school.
The first time Rachel heard about the University of Puget Sound was when her father, Michael Askew — a former Boeing Co. worker who had been displaced from his job in the Puget Sound region of Washington State during the Great Recession — took a job as a custodian at the college.
Askew had been struggling to keep up the middle class lifestyle that he had secured for his family during better days.
It was a lifestyle that enabled Askew and his wife, along with Rachel and her younger brother, Michael, Jr., to live in a spacious $400,000 home. But after he lost his job — which he believes was outsourced to India — Askew had begun to dip into his children’s college funds to save the home and avoid having to move back into the family’s much smaller rental property that had served as the family’s first home. But his efforts were to no avail.
“I took all their college money and spent it trying to keep the other place, and it wasn’t working,” Askew recalls.
Rachel remembers the toll it took on her father once he exhausted their college savings.
