San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
College shouldn’t be a fairy tale
Unlike kids who dreamed of becoming singers, actors or athletes, I grew up wanting to be a waitress.
This early career goal made sense given my working-class background. My secretary mother had barely graduated high school. My father, who’d entered the country as an undocumented Chilean immigrant without a high school diploma, worked as an elevator operator in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York City, where I was raised.
School was always my refuge, especially after my mother died when I was 16. With her death, I became a primary caregiver to my three younger sisters — and was responsible for running the household. That often meant assisting my sisters with homework or explaining something to my father in simplified English.
After the realization that I’d taught informally for years, I gave up on waitressing and aspired to become an English teacher instead.
I went to high school with the children of ex-hippies and artists. I often heard talk about a place called “college.” I couldn’t picture it, but I wanted to go, since everyone else seemed headed there. To further my educational pursuits, Dad scavenged the trash for books, giving me a guide to plants for a garden I didn’t have, a random volume “M” of the World Book Encyclopedia, and Pablo Neruda’s poetry. His newspaper delivery friend passed along multiple papers that “fell off the truck” for me daily.
The path to higher education for those of us from lower socioeconomic classes is a narrow one. Our most plentiful opportunities are those that would veer us off course. Few, if any, get second chances.
I certainly had my close calls. A well-meaning high school guidance counselor almost diverted me to the allied health vocational track, which would have had me skip college to be trained as a certified nursing assistant.
No thanks. I earned six college credits in advanced placement classes instead.
Entering puberty in the early 1990s, AIDS/HIV terrified me into celibacy and protected me from pregnancy, disease and distraction. A cautionary TV movie starring teen queen Molly Ringwald warned me a onenight stand could kill you. Fatness also insulated me. After losing 80 pounds, I finally had sex and got a boyfriend my senior year of college. We stayed together for 13 years.
Without anyone to help me, applying to college and filling out financial aid forms involved a lot of 17-year-old guesswork. Even the matter of what schools I should target was a mystery. I remembered a kind middleschool math teacher who attended Fordham University. So, I added it to my list of three.
I got in and attended Fordham on a mix of scholarships, need-based grants, and federal Stafford loans. I studied comparative literature and sociology while juggling my family responsibilities and the burdens of a commuter student who didn’t have a computer or a quiet study space. My Spanish professor, El Profe, gave me summer research assistant work and use of his office. I relished this loaner “room of one’s own,” a respite from my chaotic home life. Beforehand, I had spiraled into a major depression that required inpatient psychiatric hospitalization. A sociology professor from a rural farming background offered me support, and a glimpse into her professional life. Thanks to her, I began to see the relevance of sociology to my life as I lived through the social problems I read about in my textbooks.
Sheer will and determination powered me through hardships and toward my degree. I lived an ascetic existence of study and caretaking. I had no social life or friends. I did have the motivation passed down from my parents to try to make something of myself.
I’d long idolized my teachers and wanted to pursue a doctoral degree that would allow me to become a college professor. But I also intuited a need to understand my own traumas before I could hope to examine others’ experiences. Studying nonfiction and memoir writing, I reasoned, would offer me a way to wring some lemonade from life’s lemons.
So, I began a master of fine arts program at Columbia University, where I attended writing workshops with people from vastly different class backgrounds. One classmate’s essay divulged his father’s position as a credit card company president, and how he bought the house of a family friend, thenSen. Joe Biden.
I’d learned to push buttons for tenants in my father’s elevator.
Many assumed I was from working-class Queens, surprised to learn that I’d grown up in Manhattan. They never made that mistake about a white, blond classmate who attended my same elementary school.
It was the same when I eventually attended a Ph.D. sociology program at New York University. Many of the students in my class had professor parents. One co-authored peer-reviewed journal articles with her Ivy League professor father, who helped teach her the ins and outs of academic publishing like it was the family business.
After graduation, the stars aligned to bring me to the Bay Area when I received a prestigious UC president’s postdoctoral fellowship at Berkeley. It was instant love. The universe ultimately boomeranged me back to the Bay when UCSF recruited me to my current position, after two years in upstate New York as a professor. Kismet.
By the numbers, I shouldn’t be in my position as a university professor.
A little over 60% of Americans lack a college degree, including my three sisters. Recent analysis finds two-thirds of economics Ph.D. graduates have at least one parent with a graduate degree, with similar patterns in other disciplines. This reproduction of socioeconomic privilege among the most educated Americans has implications for the increasingly diverse students we educate. Widening educational gaps worsen already high inequality and erode democracy, further dividing us.
America loves a Horatio Alger story. I take pride in my own hero’s journey but no longer revel in my exceptionalism. Instead, I carry survivor’s guilt at achieving an impossible dream that’s moving even further out of reach for those behind me. Pursuing higher education shouldn’t require surmounting Hollywood-like odds.
Today, I try to demystify doctoral education’s “hidden curriculum” for all my students — but especially for my “first gens,” as a fellow traveler a little further up the road. Like other working-class academics on “the other side,” I still face material and psychic disadvantages. Six-figure student loan debt hangs over me like a lifelong poor tax. Impostor syndrome shadows me as I quiet the inner monologue that says I’m not good enough. Like many underrepresented in the academy, I shoulder undervalued “invisible labor” mentoring diverse students with greater mental health struggles, family caregiving and financial challenges. The pandemic exacerbated these stresses, stretching faculty thin and increasing students’ risk of interrupting their studies or dropping out altogether.
As the climb for aspiring scholars grows steeper, meritocracy seems more like the stuff of myth — a Hollywood fairy tale instead of an achievable reality. What else can we expect, given chronic disinvestment in public education and growing competition for dwindling tenure-track professorships?
Teachers like me understand the distance traveled, but without adequate investment in our country’s human capital and educational infrastructure, how can we guide our students across a crumbling bridge, to pursue the impossible dream?
I’m no longer the little girl who wanted to wear a lacefringed apron and carry an order pad, but my mind’s never far from my beginnings. My family’s love carried me to great places, bolstered by teachers who believed in me when I didn’t always believe in myself. But belief and love can only take you so far.