I spent a couple of days last week touring colleges with my oldest. This is a whole new education experience. Since the beginning of the college talk, we have discussed things that a lot of people probably don’t. When she was daydreaming about attending a school in California, I had to point out that travel back and forth would be rare because of the expense.
My thing was not being able to get to her if I needed to. I didn’t push it too hard but being in college and not at home adds layers of responsibility and obligations that didn’t previously exist. It’s a huge wake-up call for a lot of youth. Well, at least for a lot of youth with limited resources.
I’m not going to talk a lot about why students who have experienced poverty don’t always have successful college experiences away from home, although it’s very true. And despite the fact that I was a victim of that myself and wish someone would have been honest with me before I signed up for a $16,000 a year school back in 1989 (one that now costs over $30k). I am going to talk about how my failed experience will hopefully save my kid from repeating it.
College opened up my worldview by leaps and bounds. My roommate was from a different state and quite wealthy. She and I had nothing in common. We didn’t become friends because I didn’t have a bank account that allowed for it. She had a car and I didn’t even have a license. She would head an hour away to the mall while I wore the same clothes all year. She would go home when she missed her family while I had to wait for the holidays.
The one thing that made college so hard for me as a youth was how I changed and the people I loved didn’t. I was reading stuff that no one I knew had heard of or would ever care about. I had made friends with people who didn’t look like me. I had gained independence in not only living but also thinking and framing the world around me and would quickly bore when I returned home.
Money was an issue, I guess, looking back, but for silly things like not being able to walk across the street and buy a sub when I wanted to skip the dining hall. It also meant I could take nothing for granted, such as an expensive calculator mom had bought for me that I loaned to a friend who refused to give it back. I forgot to empty a washer at the laundromat once and felt awful when I had to call my mom and tell her that I didn’t just need new clothes but needed them delivered three hours away.
Despite my lived experience, I loved middle-class values. Being poor wasn’t something anyone in my life talked about, and it took me to the age of 40 to even realize that I was because I pursued that middle-class lifestyle, even if it was through something as trivial as a book club that met for coffee once a month.
Where it did make a difference was how I have raised my kids. Despite everything, I have raised them to be middle class, even when we weren’t. I wanted to eliminate the struggle of learning to function in a different world, which has proven to be successful. I don’t know if they’ll ever know or realize how pressed we were for long periods of time, to be honest. But I do know that they have certain expectations now that I didn’t have when I was a teenager.
There’s a new list of musts for a college. Take, for instance, the lack of diversity was mentioned when the admissions staff asked what concerns and shortcomings were with a particular school. And then there was the discussion of the $39,000 tuition for a career that their website had listed as a $41,000 entry-level position.
And there’s also this expectation that my kid won’t have to change much about herself to fit in. She wants a place where the diversity spans race, origin, sexuality, socioeconomic status, age, etc. I want a place where she doesn’t have to change to fit in unless she wants to. I want my kid to “rise above her raisin’,” to seize the day, and the only struggle for her to be attached to her memories.
I think college will be the real show as to how well I’ve done my job. She’ll know how to maneuver her way through it. Hopefully, the wisdom I’ve gained from mistakes will serve as her guidebook. Here’s to breaking the cycle of a poor education.
Onward,
Amy Jo
