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Luke Yeates' life-changing moment took at least a year to come about and almost didn't happen at all.
Yeates, now 28, was a laid-off call center worker who enrolled at the College of Western Idaho in 2011 with no clear idea of what he wanted to accomplish. He's a voracious reader who had gone through the gifted and talented program in the Meridian School District. But Yeates meandered through his early 20's, making an unsuccessful attempt at higher education at Boise State University. He found a calling of sorts answering an Apple help line for a French-owned company with offices in Meridian.
Yeates, the child of a police officer and an elementary school teacher, was always expected to go to college, but college felt wrong to him, he said. He liked the call center work, where he learned about computers. But he lost his job in the economic crash.
Out of work and living with his parents, Yeates ended up enrolling at CWI, the fast-growing Nampa community college founded in 2007 for traditional students and those returning to school mid-career. A fluent and prolific talker with...