Brad Hubbs sets his alarm for well before dawn twice a week. By 6:00 AM, he’s on the Rural Community Transportation bus out of St. Johnsbury, heading toward Montpelier. From there, he catches the 7:30 AM Green Mountain Transit LINK Express to Burlington, then either bikes or hops a local bus into Winooski. He walks into his 8:30 AM class at the Community College of Vermont just in time. Then, that afternoon, he does the whole thing in reverse.
That’s a five-hour round trip, three buses, and a bicycle, repeated twice a week, for a semester. All to earn an associate degree at CCV’s Winooski center, the nearest campus offering the courses he needs, located 75 miles from his home in St. Johnsbury.
Brad doesn’t own a car. He bikes everywhere he can and considers it a point of pride that he makes this commute work without one. His job at the Fairbanks Museum and Planetarium sits within walking distance of where he lives, so the only thing pulling him across the state is his education. Rather than letting geography stop him, he built a routine around Vermont’s public transit network and made it his own.
For Brad, the buses aren’t just transportation. After the isolation of the COVID years, the daily contact with other passengers, drivers, and fellow commuters has given him something he’d been missing: genuine human connection. The commute, as grueling as it looks on paper, has become part of the college experience itself.
His path to CCV was anything but straight. He started taking online classes there in 2020, a few years out of high school, after spending time working at a local grocery store and then landing an internship at the Fairbanks Museum that grew into a full-time job. As he took on more responsibility leading education programs and deepening his knowledge of science, space exploration, and astronomy, a degree started to feel less abstract and more necessary.
Financial pressure could have ended that pursuit quickly. Brad describes money as tight, and navigating the financial aid system as genuinely overwhelming. That’s where Vermont Student Assistance Corporation came back into his life. In high school, he had worked with VSAC Outreach Counselor Marti Kingsley. By the time Brad was ready to seriously pursue his degree as an adult, Kingsley had shifted her focus to helping adults access college and career training through VSAC’s Educational Opportunity Center. She was there again when he needed her.
Brad calls her an “absolute wizard” for how she simplified what felt like an impossible system. Through her guidance, he put together a package of scholarships and grants, including support from the Curtis Fund, that covered nearly all of his tuition and books. “Things were tight for me, so not needing to worry about tuition was huge, and it made a complicated process a lot simpler,” Brad said.
Even with the financial piece handled, the path wasn’t smooth. Balancing a full-time job with coursework meant navigating real tradeoffs, and Brad had setbacks along the way. But he kept returning to his coursework, kept showing up at the bus stop before sunrise, kept making the trip across the state.
Brad’s story is a familiar one in rural Vermont and across the Upper Valley. Students here often face distances and transportation barriers that their urban counterparts don’t. Public transit networks like RCT and GMT LINK exist precisely for situations like his, but they require riders to be flexible, patient, and willing to build their lives around schedules they don’t control.
What Brad has built, though, is more than a workaround. It’s a demonstration of what it actually takes to access higher education in a rural state, and how much more effort some students have to put in before they even sit down in a classroom. His associate degree, when he finishes it, will represent something more than completed coursework. It will represent every early morning, every transfer, every mile covered on two wheels, and every person who helped him figure out how to keep going.
