Out of Class

“I need financial aid to go to college but my mom won’t sign the papers,” she said. “I’m 18, what can I do?”

I know that story. I never expected to hear it from anyone else though. I thought I was the only person in the U.S. whose parents refused to help their children go to college. With all the politicking and pushing today for everyone to go to college, and the cultural belief in family support and pride in each other’s success, it’s easy to feel like an alien when you have to go it alone.

It must be your own fault, too. Presidents Clinton to Bush to Obama, through one plan or another, have intended to make college accessible to every kid who graduates from high school. So hey, all you got to do is make it through 12 years. Then, the world is your oyster as you head off to college and take your rightful place in making each generation more successful than the last. In recent years, we’ve recognized that foster kids might need extra help, but otherwise, of course we’ve all got parents who push us, prod us, and support us on to that great equalizer, college.

Every scholarly study on the benefits of higher education relates college degrees to earning power. Without a college degree, you make very little money, say the studies. Without a college degree, you can’t hope to reap the fruits of America’s orchard. Go to college. Get a degree. Maybe even two. Without it, you’re zero. You’ll amount to nothing in America. You’ll be broke and miserable and wind up on the street sleeping under cardboard. Begging for scraps from the educated. Who, by the way, will step over you on their way to a seaside restaurant. It’s your own damn fault, they’ll say. Should have gone to college.

And whether your culture values higher education or not, mainstream culture does, and that’s what counts.

For me though, money wasn’t the motivator. Every study of employee motivation tells us that, yes, money is appreciated, we can always use more of it, but money alone won’t make us happy with our job, won’t make us want to improve the widget-making process or streamline the paperwork. The paycheck boost looks good, for a couple of months, but then we start wondering how long it’ll take to get the next one.

Money isn’t enough of a motivator to get through 12 years of working toward a four-year degree. That’s how long it took me, working a full-time job and supporting myself, to earn a Bachelor’s degree. College for me was about learning, about understanding the world around me, and before me. It was about how the world might be different in the future than it is today. It was about how I might change the world. Before I started the first grade, I was a reader. Every week, my mom gave me carte blanche at our small town’s public library. Into the big kid’s section I’d go. No baby books for me. And when, in the third grade, I found the adult section, the librarian had a heart to heart with my mother. My mother won. So did I.

My parents were blue collar small business people in the rural Mid-West. College wasn’t necessary to make a good living then. You just needed to work hard.

To my dad, that meant physical labor. Thinking was NOT work. Writing, drawing, playing music, that was NOT work. If you didn’t sweat. If your muscles didn’t bulge and pop and occasionally get bruised, then you weren’t working. You were lazy, loafing, living off the labor of others.

Even so, as long as my mom was around, I assumed I’d go to college. My teachers encouraged it. I should be a teacher, or a nurse, they said. Ugh, I thought. A scientist maybe. An artist maybe. Or an explorer. I had a couple of distant cousins, my parents’ age, who had college degrees, so college wasn’t completely unheard of. Even though these cousins lived in big cities, far away from us, and we never saw them. One of them was crazy, my dad said. College made him that way. The other one, who’d grown up in the city, had no common sense. He thought he could live on the land. Grow his own food. Build his own house powered by the sun. Provide for himself. College made him stupid, my dad said.

When my mom left us, my parents divorced, and it was the end of my college dreams. My dad had the money. He had custody of my brother, sister and me. And he hated college. Besides making people crazy and stupid, it turned them into smart alecky, know-it-alls. At 13, I was that already.

The next several years were a rough ride for all of us. Living on my own at 17 and working the graveyard shift in a nursing home, I finished high school.

I was a writer. Interested in journalism, my work was the backbone of our high school newspaper and literary magazine, and the University of Missouri’s School of Journalism was considering offering me a scholarship, as were local businesses and organizations. “Take my name off the scholarship list,” I told our high school counselor. I couldn’t see it working. Four years was eternity. And the idea of moving into a tiny dorm room with 18-year-old women who were just out of high school and living away from home for the first time, whose concerns would be different than mine, seemed unbearably isolating.

Before the summer was over, I realized my mistake. I couldn’t live without going to college. But how?

Off I went to the financial aid office at the local university asking the same question the young woman asked me on the phone. The financial aid officers needed my dad’s income information and signature. I knew he wouldn’t give it, but I asked. He didn’t. There was little the university could do. The minuscule scholarships still available weren’t even enough to pay for books. I had to work for another year then file an income tax return to prove financial independence, so I could get loans.

By that time, my old Chevy died, so I had to borrow a few hundred dollars to buy another used car. At minimum wage, paychecks didn’t always cover the rent, and I fell behind. I was living on 19 cent boxes of macaroni and cheese from the thrift store. Debts were accumulating from everywhere. It was gonna be a long haul.

*****

I mentioned the student’s phone call to our Dean of Student Development Services. “I hear that a lot from our students,” she said. “Some parents think their job’s done when their kid turns 18. They’re on their own. They don’t seem to care if their child does better than they did.”

Some parents don’t want their children to do better. That’s a fact that our cultural myths and rhetoric about family hides.

A professor, whose son entered his father’s field and was beginning to win awards and garner attention, told me that he was proud but jealous. He wanted his son to do well, but not surpass his own achievements. In the case of a working class family, sending a child to college may, as it did for my dad, counter their own values. A college education is not considered “better.” For other working class parents, there’s the fear of losing their children if they send them to college. What will they learn? Who will they be when they finish their degree? Will they still be part of the family? Will they want to come home? Working class culture, is not educated professional culture.

*****

For working class people, colleges are remote, even when they live nearby. So the first semester I went to enroll at the university, my younger sister went with me. She didn’t know any more about what we were doing than I did, but she was at least a familiar face, in an otherwise foreign environment. Besides, if she decided to go to college in a few years, she’d have a bit of experience to make it less daunting. We met my advisor in a big hall where other students were doing the same thing at tables scattered around the room. My sister and I sat down across the card table from her but she told my sister to go sit in a row of chairs by the wall until we were finished. I wonder if she would have shooed away a parent who was accompanying their child.

The advisor then tried to convince me to register for basic English, Math and Science courses. I had other plans. I knew I wasn’t going to be able to get through college in four years, so I wanted to take courses that interested me and that might help me earn more than minimum wage before I finished college. She didn’t get it. There were specified courses for freshmen, she explained. There were course sequences. There were prerequisites. I insisted. She insisted. After multiple volleys, I ended up taking an English course and a History course, to satisfy the university, and Journalism courses, to satisfy me.

I don’t know how much this experience affected my sister’s view of higher education. We never commented on it, working class people don’t mention humiliations. She never finished high school. Neither did my brother, whose artistic talents shine even without nurturing. He uses them in building. Construction or carpentry, now that’s something a working class man does. He doesn’t draw or paint on a canvas. Reading and writing books, that’s not what a working class woman does. She gets married, has babies, works on the farm, in a factory or as a waitress, hairdresser or clerk in a retail store or fast food restaurant. She doesn’t travel around the world, go to museums and film festivals, or live independently in the city.

*****

I didn’t notice the social class differences much while working on my undergraduate degree. I hit the campus for class, then left for my full-time job, so I didn’t know other students or professors. Whatever happened on campus, short of its closing down, was irrelevant to me.

In graduate school, however, three years after I finished my bachelor’s degree, social class distinctions were obvious, even pointed at times.

Attending full-time on an assistantship, I spent every day with my peers and professors. In this program, there was a not-so-subtle distinction between students who were doctoral material and those who intended to end their education with a Masters. As a student deemed doctoral worthy, I was expected to attend professional conferences and present my work. The problem was, I was actually trying to live off of my assistantship, with no supplemental money flowing in from home. Pointing out my lack of funds made some of my friends and professors uncomfortable. How could I be there, looking like them, doing credible scholarly work, yet not have the same financial resources and family support. They weren’t privileged, after all. Just middle class. Must be that I was scared, or resisting. I just didn’t want to do the things that would bolster my career. When I declined acceptance into a Ph.D. program, one professor told me, dismissively, that I could do it if it was important enough to me. I just wasn’t willing to sacrifice.

*****

That summer, I went to my dad’s house for dinner. It was the first time we’d seen each other in 20 years. His stepson, who I remember at about age 9 chopping up the plants in my room, and generally being annoying, immediately told a story about spinning his truck’s wheels to fling gravel onto the fancy car of some “city slickers” who were driving on a country road.

What do you say to each other after 20 years’ and two college degrees worth of separation?

Relying on the presence of food and neighbors, my dad was clearly hoping for a smooth visit. The questions were superficial, intended to be non-confrontational, but even these bland queries couldn’t avoid the class differences. “What kind of car do you drive,” he asked. When I told him a Honda, his wife laughed and hit me on the shoulder. “So aren’t you gonna talk about people who drive those foreign cars, the way you usually do?” “Nah,” my dad said, trying to get along, “that’s the kind of car professors drive.”

None of my first cousins or aunts and uncles went to college, and sometimes, in each other’s company, it’s as if they don’t know who they’re talking to. I’m a stranger that they’re supposed to know, but aren’t quite sure they do. Sometimes I’m not sure myself, about how much I’ve really changed. I’m not a professor. I told my dad before, in explaining my job, that I don’t teach. But educated people are foreign, unknown entities. There are few books in my dad’s house, and that’s what educated people do, don’t they? Write books.

Their world feels foreign to me too, but in some ways it always did. Which was part of why I knew I had to go to college. Sometimes it’s difficult to separate the class distinctions from the jagged edges my family’s divorce and disruption caused. My brother and I talk, tentatively, cautiously. But eventually there’s a place where our souls connect, a place where we know and remember each other. It’s a place where life is what it is, regardless of class and distance and pain. I tell him about the trip I’m taking to Europe in the fall. He tells me, standing on the front porch of his cabin he built himself from scrap wood, that he’ll never have the money to travel, but he’d like to. I’ll never have the money to buy a house, I say. I got started too late. We’d both like to do it all. But we have to choose.

That year, finally, I paid off my student loans. But another young woman was just starting the trek.