The Challenge of the First-Generation Student

May 22, 2015 ● $6.99 THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION Volume LXI, Number 36

Diversity in Academe

A2 T H E C H RO N I C L E O F H I G H E R E D U C AT I O N • D I V E R S I T Y I N AC A D E M E MAY 22, 2015

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Diversity in AcademeTHE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION . May 22, 2015

THE CHALLENGE OF THE FIRST-GENERATION STUDENT

OPINION

First-Generation BluesDwight Lang knows firsthand why students struggle as they transition from one social class to another: A18

Blue-Collar ScholarFor Liz Mayo, working at the factory was a summer job. Her mother wasn’t as lucky: A20

Making First-GenerationStudents a PriorityToo often, colleges take students’ tuition money and leave them floundering, say Joseph Sanacore and Anthony Palumbo: A22

Spreading the Riches of Study AbroadAaron Bruce thinks such programs could be more sensitive to low-income and other students who haven’t traveled much: A24

Don’t Overlook Transfer StudentsCommunity-college graduates can help elite colleges diversify, writes Laura Huober: A25

Mentors MatterYou can go only so far on your own, writes Eric Rodriguez: A26

I F YOU ARE a low-income student whose parents never earned a de-gree, simply getting to college is hard enough. You probably didn’t

get much help from your parents, let alone from pricey private counselors or test-prep courses. But somehow you figured out which classes to take in high school, how to fill out financial-aid forms and college applications, and where to go.

Once you enroll, you’ve got a bunch of new stuff to figure out — starting, maybe, with what to study or even how to study. You may need to take remedial courses. You may feel work and family pressures. And if you’re at a selective

college, you may feel left out when class-mates travel to Europe during summer vacations or work in unpaid internships (often in expensive cities) that you can’t afford to pursue.

This special report is filled with the

voices of first-generation students — like Eudocia Montiel, who applied to Hamilton College secretly because she didn’t think her parents would approve of her leaving home. Our report also looks at efforts underway on some

campuses to help such students, whose numbers are growing as demographics shift. Ms. Montiel is now thriving at Hamilton. Her father, Manuel Montiel, a Mexican immigrant, has also learned a few things from his daughter’s college experience, which he now fully sup-ports. In this country, he says, “The only way to progress is to gain even more levels of education.” (Read more about Ms. Montiel’s experience on Page A7.)

Thanks to the writers, editors, and designers who worked on this issue. We hope readers find it useful.

—CAROLYN MOONEY

SENIOR EDITOR, SPECIAL SECTIONS

EDITOR’S NOTE

Cover illustration by Jason Greenberg for The Chronicle

The Chronicle is on its summer print-publishing schedule. The next full issue, dated May 29, will be mailed to subscribers on May 22. The Chronicle Crossword will return in next week’s issue of The Chronicle Review, dated May 29.

NOTE TO READERS

Creating a Path for SuccessMore first-generation students are enrolling, but not all colleges are prepared to meet their needs: A4n At Hamilton College, administrators

who were themselves first-generation students help pave the way: A7

n An Illinois College program gives students a jump-start that carries them through graduation: A8

n Student mentors from the U. of Texas at Brownsville help high-school students see a future in science: A8

n The High Potential Program at Saint Mary’s College of California helps students navigate campus stress: A10

A Growing Demand for Child CareWithout this “critical benefit,” many students who are parents say they couldn’t finish college: A12

‘Rainbow’ AdviserVirginia S. Yans is well known for mentoring working-class and minority Ph.D. students: A15

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A4 T H E C H RO N I C L E O F H I G H E R E D U C AT I O N • D I V E R S I T Y I N AC A D E M E MAY 22, 2015

TAE-HYUN SAKONG would love to be able to tell his parents why he decided to major in neuroscience, and what it was like to help his biology professor probe a genetic risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease.

The Trinity University undergraduate also wishes he could tell them about the anxiety and depression that overwhelm him when he compares himself with classmates who attended elite prep schools and spend spring breaks in Cancun. But his parents, who never went to college, speak little English, and he speaks his native Korean at a grade-school level.

“I would kill to be able to explain to them what I do,” he says.Michael Soto, an associate professor of English at Trinity, un-

derstands. A first-generation college student himself, he grew up in

Brownsville, Tex., on the border with Mexico. His parents couldn’t understand why he decided to pursue a doctorate in English after graduating from Stanford.

“It was probably four years into graduate school that my mom finally stopped asking me when I was going to go to law school,” he says.

The support Mr. Soto received as an undergraduate prompted him to become a champion for first-generation students, who now repre-sent about 15 percent of Trinity’s undergraduate population.

Mr. Sakong, 22, says that if it weren’t for professors like Mr. Soto and James Roberts, his biology professor and adviser, he would have dropped out long ago.

As colleges seek to diversify their student bodies and patch up their leaky pipelines for disadvantaged students, many are expanding efforts

The Challenge of the First-Generation StudentColleges amp up efforts to retain them, but hurdles remain

BY KATHERINE MANGAN

ANH VIET

Tae-Hyun Sakong migrated from South Korea at age 7 and today majors in neuroscience at Trinity U. His life is a world apart from that of his parents, neither of whom attended college. “I would kill to be able to explain to them what I do,” he says.

MAY 22, 2015 D I V E R S I T Y I N AC A D E M E • T H E C H RO N I C L E O F H I G H E R E D U C AT I O N A5

to connect students who are the first in their families to attend college with supportive classmates, advisers, and professors. Some colleges have formal, longstanding programs in place, while others offer schol-arships or informal support groups. But despite the fact that a growing number of first-generation college students are arriving on their door-steps, many other colleges are doing little to meet their needs, either because they have trouble identifying such students or because their budgets are strained.

The challenges these students face are daunting. First-generation students tend to work longer hours at their jobs, are less likely to live on campus, and are more likely to have parents who would struggle to complete financial-aid forms. They’re also more likely to arrive aca-demically unprepared for the rigors of college and to require remedi-ation before they can start earning college credit.

Many feel the tug of family responsibilities, rushing home after class to take care of younger siblings or missing classes to care for an ailing grandparent.

The disparity in household income is striking: Median family in-come at two- and four-year institutions for freshmen whose parents didn’t attend college was $37,565 last year, compared with $99,635 for those whose parents did. The New York Times calculated those figures using data from the Higher Education Research Institute at the Uni-versity of California at Los Angeles.

Having lived so close to the margins, “first-generation students tend to be risk-averse,” says Thomas G. Mortenson, a senior scholar at the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education.

“Many of them continue being breadwinners for their families when they go off to college.”

CLEARLY, these students need extra support to stay enrolled, and colleges have a strong interest in identifying their most vulnerable groups to keep them from dropping out. But identifying first-generation students isn’t as easy as it sounds.

Colleges usually have to rely on self-reporting, since the Census Bu-reau no longer tracks parents’ education attainment. The Common Application, like many colleges’ own applications, asks students about the highest level of education their parents achieved. More than 28 percent of the 800,000 students who used the Common Application last year reported that they were first-generation students. They rep-resent a diverse swath of society. At the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where about one in five undergraduates is a first-generation student, about 90 percent are white, many from small towns and farms.

Then there’s the whole issue of whom to include. Some colleges use the first-generation designation when neither of the student’s parents attended college. Others define it more narrowly to mean that nei-ther parent graduated from college, or from a four-year college in the United States. That definition, used for eligibility in some federal-aid programs, would consider the daughter of two community-college graduates a first-generation college student.

However you define them, first-generation students represent a sig-nificant share of the prospective students that colleges, eager to trumpet their track records in diversifying their enrollments, are trying to recruit.

Of students who entered four-year colleges as freshmen last year, more than 45 percent reported that their fathers had no college degree of any kind, and 42 percent said their mothers lacked degrees, a survey found. About a quarter of their parents had no postsecondary educa-tion, according to the survey by UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute.

The Council of Independent Colleges concluded in a report released earlier this year that small and midsize colleges, with their small class-es, involved faculty members, and extracurricular activities, do the best job retaining low-income and first-generation students. The stu-dents are more likely to finish their bachelor’s degrees in four years at a smaller private college than they are in six years at a public nondoc-toral university, the researchers found.

Despite the higher sticker prices at small private colleges, first-gen-eration students who attend them pay on average only $1,000 more per year than do similar students at public research universities, mostly because of more generous scholarships, the report found.

Smith College is a case in point. Seventeen percent of its under-graduate students have parents who didn’t graduate from college, and it is among the institutions that offer generous perks to qualified

first-generation students. Last month, at a campus event for newly ac-cepted students, faculty and staff members who were themselves the first in their families to attend college wore T-shirts proclaiming their first-generation status.

Among them was the college’s president, Kathleen McCartney.“I want them to know that I was once a first-generation college stu-

dent and that they should set their aspirations as high as they want to,” she says. While first-generation students tend to feel pressure to emerge from college with a clear career path, “I want them to know that if they want to major in philosophy, they should major in philos-ophy,” she says. She tells students that employers value strong liber-al-arts backgrounds.

WHEN elite institutions like Smith, Amherst College, or Harvard University enroll significant numbers of first-generation students, their stories are often splashed across the news. But regional state univer-sities and community colleges have been identify-

ing and supporting these students for decades, through federal TRIO programs, a collection of outreach and student-services efforts geared toward low-income students.

“We have seen this trend of elite colleges and universities that are well endowed actively and aggressively recruiting low-income, first-genera-tion students,” says James T. Minor, deputy assistant secretary for high-er-education programs at the U.S. Department of Education.

“They tend to be high-achieving students, and we think that’s won-derful,” he adds. “But that, unfortunately, is not the majority of stu-dents from that demographic.” He believes the overwhelming majority of first-generation students attend community colleges and open-ac-cess four-year public colleges, many of which, he says, have benefited from 50 years of TRIO-funded programs.

Some examples include a “talent search” program that allows col-leges to offer intensive preparation for students at underserved schools and the McNair Scholars Program, which encourages first-generation and other underrepresented college students like Trinity’s Mr. Sakong to pursue doctoral study.

California State University-Dominguez Hills is a largely minori-ty campus in Los Angeles’s South Bay where more than 60 percent of freshmen are the first in their immediate families to attend college. The university offers a TRIO-funded support program for first-generation and low-income students that includes academic coaching, tutoring, peer mentoring, financial-literacy training, and graduate-school preparation.

“Everyone always asks, Is the student ready for college? But we also Continued on Following Page

SMITH COLLEGE

Kathleen McCartney (right), president of Smith College, and Debra Shaver, dean of admission, were themselves the first members of their families to attend college.

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professional college advisers who, on average, are responsible for 450 students (and up to 1,000 or more in states like California), according to Nicole Hurd, founder and chief executive of the ad-vising group.

About 70 percent of the corps’ young advisers are from underrep-resented minority groups, and more than half have parents who never graduated from college.

An analysis of the program by Stanford University found that high-school seniors who met with an adviser were 30 percent more likely to apply to college, 24 percent more likely to be accepted by at least one, and 26 percent more likely to submit the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or Fafsa.

And despite their disadvantaged economic status, three quarters of the students who enrolled in college persisted through the second year — about the same as the national average.

A spokesman for the advising group said it doesn’t yet have compar-ative graduation rates, but it hopes to start tracking them soon.

One of those advisers, Erica R. Elder, returned to her high school in Bassett, Va., to provide the kind of boost that helped get her into the University of Virginia.

The challenges she has faced as an adviser remind her of her own struggles while applying to college.

She has encountered students who didn’t see college as a realistic option, and who were ready to give up with any minor setback in the admissions process. Parents who were ashamed about their meager earnings and ignorance about college wouldn’t look her in the eye during financial-aid nights.

But when acceptances started rolling in for students she has advised, she would arrive at school at 8 a.m. to find two or three students ready to greet her. “When they come bursting into my office,” she says, “it’s the best feeling in the world.”

William Bui Tran is the first in his family to go to college, and he’s achieving the dream tuition-free.

He’s part of an innovative project to bring first-generation students from his northwest Iowa hometown of Storm Lake to the University of Iowa.

Created by UI President Sally Mason—herself once a first-generation college student—Storm Lake Scholars grants exemplify Iowa’s commitment to accessible education for students from all backgrounds.

First-generation students make up a quarter of William’s UI class. Iowa’s focus on their success promises even more opportunities for families and communities alike.

Dreamers. Scholars.

Hawkeyes.

See more of the story at bit.ly/stormlakescholars

ask, Is the university ready for the student?” says William Franklin, interim vice president of enrollment management and student affairs. He was a first-generation student himself who graduated from the University of Southern California after being recruited by USC and a TRIO program called Upward Bound.

“We need to ensure that we work closely with parents,” he said, “and that first-generation students know how to navigate this place when they may not have a parent or sibling to talk to about financial aid, housing, or adding and dropping classes.”

A number of public universities have designated scholarships for first-generation students, but many are deterred by the extra cost of intensive advising and financial support the students typically require.

“The budget pressures that all higher education is under have four-year state institutions, particularly flagships, looking more carefully at the revenue potential of those they enroll,” says Mr. Mortenson of the Pell Institute. According to that metric, foreign and out-of-state students who pay full freight are the most valuable, while, he says, “the lowest priority are the lowest-income students who require an institutional discount.”

Those students, though, make up a sizable chunk of the total pro-spective student population, and many colleges have concluded that they’re worth investing in.

TO HELP STUDENTS who are most likely to fall through the cracks, a nonprofit group called the College Ad-vising Corps this year placed about 450 recent college graduates of its 23 partner colleges into more than 500 underserved high schools in 14 states. The new gradu-

ates serve as full-time college advisers, supplementing the work of

Continued From Preceding Page

EUDOCIA MONTIEL didn’t tell her parents she was applying to Hamilton College. After she got in, she snuck off to a program for admitted students by fibbing that

she was staying at a friend’s house.Ms. Montiel knew that her parents, who

had immigrated from Mexico and settled in the South Bronx, wouldn’t approve of her at-tending the small liberal-arts college in up-state New York — or any college. As they saw it, their daughter could speak English well and was set to graduate from high school. Why would she want to risk college when so many other local students had left commu-nity colleges with nothing more than debt?

“I ‘came out’ to them only after I got my financial-aid package, which provided a full ride for the first year,” Ms. Montiel says.

It’s hard for anyone to earn a college degree without some support, but that’s especially true for students like Ms. Montiel, who are the first in their families to pursue one. Now a junior at Hamilton, Ms. Montiel was for-tunate to find the right college. Several top administrators at Hamilton, including the vice presidents for admissions and develop-ment, and the president, Joan Hinde Stewart, the daughter of a Brooklyn steamfitter, were first-generation college students. They know firsthand that the 14 percent of Hamilton’s students who are first generation (meaning their parents did not complete a bachelor’s degree) must be enterprising to get to college, and just as intrepid to stay and graduate.

Such students get special consideration in Hamilton’s admissions process, says Monica Inzer, vice president and dean of admission and financial aid. “The kids our faculty love most aren’t the ones with the highest SATs,” she says. “They want more of the kids who are grateful and work hard — often those are

ones who are first in their families to go to college.”

In 2010, Hamilton provided a boost to first-generation students by joining the rel-atively small number of selective private col-leges that promise to be both need-blind in admission and to meet the full financial need of all students who enroll.

Hamilton’s website lists the large num-ber of administrators and professors who were first-generation students, and the col-lege invites current students to connect with them. “At a place like Hamilton, you can look around and feel like, ‘I’m the only one who doesn’t get this,’” says Nancy Thomp-son, Hamilton’s dean of students, who was a first-generation student herself. “That’s just not true — a lot of us have learned that ‘lan-guage’ and come to understand it.”

Even after one of Ms. Montiel’s high-school teachers visited her home to plead with her parents to allow her to go to Hamilton, they still weren’t sure — they feared she would become addicted to drugs or alcohol, or end up in debt despite her generous aid package. In an interview, with his daughter acting as translator, Manuel Montiel says he only came around to the idea after Eudocia returned home from Hamilton and proved to be more independent and helpful at home than be-fore. A cook until he lost his job, Mr. Montiel now does maintenance work at the apartment building where his family lives. He hopes other immigrant parents can overcome the fears he had. “Children are here to progress in this country,” he says. “The only way to prog-ress is to gain even more levels of education.”

Ms. Montiel planned to return home after her freshman year to help pay for college by working at McDonald’s or a clothing store. But a Hamilton program called First Year Forward, one of several efforts to help

first-generation students succeed, provides career counseling and a $2,000 stipend for summer internships. Ms. Montiel used the stipend to work as a counselor at a public high school’s summer band camp.

Hamilton has known for years that incom-ing freshmen who bond with other students during preorientation wilderness or ser-vice-learning trips are more likely to persist and graduate. But only about half of incoming students typically sign up for such a trip — with many first-gener-ation students opting out, in part because of the additional cost. Starting this fall, all students will be re-quired to take a trip, with financial aid covering the expense for students from low-income families. For first-generation students, the policy change “will provide a social foundation that will serve them well as they get launched at Hamilton,” Ms. Thompson says.

Hamilton started the Student Emergency Aid Society four years ago to provide funds to cover special requests from Hamilton’s neediest students. Bennett Hambrook, a first-generation student from British Colum-bia whose father is a concrete worker, men-tioned to an administrator that he couldn’t afford to return home for spring break or to replace his dying computer. The commit-tee that oversees the fund approved a check worth about $1,000 to cover those expenses.

“It’s not just about access,” says Vige Bar-rie, a Hamilton spokeswoman. “It’s about equalizing the experience once students get to campus.” —BEN GOSE

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HEATHER AINSWORTH

Nancy Thompson (right), dean of students, with a colleague, Allen Harrison (second from left), and three Hamilton students. All were or are the first in their families to attend college.

Students who break family barriers by pursuing a higher education get special consideration.

At Hamilton College, Top AdministratorsWere Themselves First-Generation Students

A8 T H E C H RO N I C L E O F H I G H E R E D U C AT I O N • D I V E R S I T Y I N AC A D E M E MAY 22, 2015

NEARLY HALF of the stu-dents at Illinois College are the first in their fam-ilies to go to college. But only 18 of the roughly

275 freshmen who enroll each year at the private institution in Jacksonville, Ill., are admitted to the Yates Fellow-ship Program, a yearlong “learning community” designed to help first-gen-eration students succeed.

The college uses student essays and recommendations from high-school teachers to choose students for the program, which aspires to in-clude both at-risk students and high-er-achieving students who can serve as role models. About 40 students per year apply for the 18 slots.

The centerpiece is a two-week sum-mer session, held just before the fall

semester starts, during which students work on writing and math, get tips on organizational and study skills, and learn how a liberal-arts degree can help them achieve career and life goals.

Students’ pride in winning a spot often turns to concern when they arrive and discover just how much time the Yates program requires. The summer session is chock-full of activities, from 8 in the morning until 11 at night, says Andrew Jones, the college's dean of student suc-cess. “The students are a bit shocked and dismayed about that,” he says.

The program’s requirements contin-ue throughout the year.

During the fall semester, Yates stu-dents are required to take two courses together — one on speech fundamen-tals and another on exploring identi-ty. They live in the same dormitory, participate in social events and study halls together, and take a third course together during the spring.

The program appears to be working. Yates participants consistently outper-form other Illinois College students who were eligible for the program, Mr. Jones says.

The program was started in 2008 with a $100,000 grant from the Walmart Foundation. Illinois College was one of 50 members of the Council of Independent Colleges — an associa-tion of liberal-arts colleges — to receive a Walmart grant through a special pro-gram designed to help first-generation students succeed. The college’s success with the Yates program helped it land a much larger grant in 2010 from the fed-eral TRIO student-support program, worth about $1.1 million over five years.

One reason for the Yates program’s effectiveness, says Mr. Jones, is the large number of Illinois College instructors — nearly a third of the total faculty — who were first-generation students themselves. Every Yates student has an informational interview with a faculty member before the first semester.

Ryan Flynn, who plans to graduate this month, says the biggest benefit he received from the program was learning how to network and to locate campus

offices that could help him succeed. Mr. Flynn’s father works in a retail setting, stocking products in stores, while his mother is an administrative assistant.

“I grew up with parents who were very independent,” Mr. Flynn says. “They know how to figure stuff out on their own. That’s how a lot of first-gen-eration students are — you’ll opt to fig-ure it out on your own, or not pursue help at all.”

But the Yates program provided a different perspective. During the two-week summer session, he says, he made contacts with other students and facul-ty and staff members who helped him get through the first year. “Those were people you felt like you could reach out to,” Mr. Flynn says. “Most students didn’t have those connections.”

Many first-generation students pur-sue a college degree in a quest for a bet-ter-paying job, but the Yates program introduces the idea that college is about far more than earning a credential. During the summer session, students

are asked to write short “This I Believe … ” essays, after the former NPR show of the same name.

Beth Capo, an English professor who teaches the writing component of the program, says she prods students to re-flect on why they have chosen to take the bold step of becoming the first in their families to pursue a college de-gree.

“By the end, they see that writing is for a purpose,” she says, “and that it can be a much more important purpose than ‘I have to do a paper for a class.’” —BEN GOSE

At Illinois College, a Fellowship Helps Students Succeed

Student Mentors Keep High-Schoolers Engaged Through College

VALERIE BARRIENTOS’S first experience with col-lege was in a high-school classroom, where student mentors from the Univer-

sity of Texas at Brownsville made sci-ence fun.

Her favorite activity was the anatomy contest, in which she and other students raced to see how quickly they could pull internal organs from a mannequin,

label them, and stuff them back in. Field trips to a cloud forest in Mexico and an astronomy park in West Texas were interspersed with science experi-ments and snippets of insight into col-lege life.

Her mentors with the university’s South Texas Engineering, Math and Science program, or STEMS, ex-plained what it would take to get there.

“I didn’t know anything about ap-

plying to college, that you had to take the ACT or the SAT and that you had to prepare for it,” says the 23-year-old senior from La Feria, Tex., outside Brownsville. “My parents couldn’t tell me because they didn’t know.”

The closest either of Ms. Barrien-tos’s parents came to getting a college degree was when her father obtained a certificate in automotive maintenance.

ILLINOIS COLLEGE

Ryan Flynn (right, in the library archives at Illinois College), says the Yates Fellowship Program gave him connections other students didn’t have.

“That’s how a lot of first-generation students are — you’ll opt to figure it out on your own.”

Continued on Page A10

James Carothers works toward a world of

good by developing medical innovations

and renewable chemicals and fuels. In

support of the next generation of scientists,

he hosts summer research experiences

for underrepresented and low-income

teens, widening the pathway to STEM

careers for everyone. “I am a big believer

in extending opportunities in science and

engineering early — and often,” he says.

BE A WORLD OF GOOD

BE BOUNDLESS

UW.EDU/DIVERSITY

JAMES CAROTHERSAssistant Professor, Chemical Engineering

Member, Molecular Engineering & Sciences Institute

MAY 22, 2015 D I V E R S I T Y I N AC A D E M E • T H E C H RO N I C L E O F H I G H E R E D U C AT I O N A9

A10 T H E C H RO N I C L E O F H I G H E R E D U C AT I O N • D I V E R S I T Y I N AC A D E M E MAY 22, 2015

She wanted to study medicine, and the university’s 26-year-old STEMS pro-gram cracked open a door into that world. Now she’s a mentor with the program, which sends Brownsville students into 44 low-income schools across the Rio Grande Valley to spark interest in higher education through hands-on science.

While other colleges are casting far and wide to reel in talented first-gen-eration students, Brownsville, which is located on the Mexican border in one of the nation’s poorest communities, recruits locally.

Some 77 percent of its entering stu-

dents have parents who didn’t graduate from college. For the student body as a whole, the percentage drops to 56 per-cent of the 7,500 students enrolled full time. Some of those students transfer to other colleges, but many others drop out.

You won’t find many clubs or semi-nars there specifically designated for first-generation students. Because they represent the overwhelming majority of incoming students, intensive sup-port programs are open to everyone. It would also be hard to reserve blocks of time for first-generation students ex-clusively to get together, administrators say.

While many first-generation stu-dents at private colleges receive schol-arships and attend full time, the stu-dents at Brownsville are more likely to be juggling work and family responsi-bilities, says Javier Martinez, interim provost and vice president for academic affairs.

In close-knit Hispanic communi-ties, he says, “their priorities are family, work, and school,” in that order. That’s the reality administrators will continue to face as the university merges with the University of Texas-Pan American and adds a new medical school this August.

It will be known as the University of Texas-Rio Grande Valley.

To help keep students enrolled, near-ly all of the sections of courses with high dropout rates — including first-year English, math, and history — have embedded tutors who meet right after class with students to be sure they un-derstand the material. Programs like STEMS, says Ms. Barrientos, show students like her that “there’s a whole world out there” and that college holds the key. —KATHERINE MANGAN

“I didn’t know anything about applying to college, that you had to take the ACT or the SAT.”

AS A FRESHMAN at Saint Mary’s College of Cal-ifornia, Gabriella Perez faced the usual challeng-es that first-generation

students encounter during their first year on a college campus, and more: She worried that her parents would be deported to Mexico.

They had to hire a lawyer to avoid that fate, and her father lost his job, so Ms. Perez was forced to take out a pric-ey private loan to attend the college, located in the San Francisco Bay Area. And she says she endured racial taunts from other first-year students in her dormitory.

The cumulative stress led Ms. Perez to think about dropping out, but a long-running program that provides support to first-generation students

Continued From Page A8

JAVIER GARCIA

Valerie Barrientos (left), a student in the U. of Texas at Brownsville’s South Texas Engineering, Math and Sci-ence program, trains a mentor in how to work with high-school students.

Gabriella Perez hugs Susana Pinzon at year’s end

at Saint Mary’s College of California. The college’s

High Potential Program steered them both toward helpful campus resources.

Program Helps Students Navigate the Unfamiliar Terrain of CollegeFamily issues, racial taunting, and other challenges threaten to derail an education

NOAH BERGER

helped her stay in college. The univer-sity’s High Potential Program, which started in 1973, features a two-week summer institute to prepare first-gener-ation students for college, a peer-advis-ing program, and weekly classes during the school year on topics such as time management, study skills, and financial aid.

For Ms. Perez, whose father is a butcher and mother works for a federal food-assistance program, the informal aspects of the program made the differ-ence. “The people in the program,” she says, “they became the tools that were missing in my toolbox.”

The director of the High Potential Program insisted that Ms. Perez meet with her weekly after Ms. Perez re-sponded angrily to racial remarks made by others on her dormitory floor, and talked about dropping out of the col-lege. The program’s staff helped her get a job on campus, provided emotional support, assisted her in negotiations with the financial-aid office, and di-rected her toward classes where they thought she would succeed.

By her sophomore year, Ms. Perez was thriving — even though she was working three campus jobs to help pay tuition. She graduated last May, and will start a master’s program in higher education and student affairs in the fall at the University of San Francisco.

Gloria Sosa, a co-director of the High Potential Program and an as-sistant professor of counseling at the 4,200-student institution, says first-generation students like Ms. Perez face greater challenges than their peers because they don’t know how to suc-cessfully navigate at college, and their parents may take actions that hurt rath-er than help. The student may have aced classes at an undemanding high school, leaving parents confused — or even angry — if their son or daughter is labeled academically underprepared by Saint Mary’s. Some parents may also expect their child to return home every weekend, leaving too little time for the student to study.

“It’s not that the parents are saying, ‘Don’t go to college,’” Ms. Sosa says. “They want the student to go to col-lege. But they don’t always understand the significant stressors that students face.”

During the year, the peer mentors in the High Potential Program meet with new students as often as once a week and help steer newcomers toward re-sources they learned about during the summer program. “The peer mentor will say, ‘You went to the career center during boot camp, but let’s go there again,’” Ms. Sosa says. “It’s really about keeping the dialogue going.”

Freshman-to-sophomore retention rates for participants in the program have matched or exceeded retention rates for others at the college, some-times by large percentages.

Ms. Sosa says the retention data show the program is working, and now she’s

trying to expand it. She has applied for a grant from the federal TRIO program that would be worth about $1.5-million over five years. She’d like to expand the summer program from two weeks to four, begin placing students togeth-er with their first-generation peers in blocks of two to three courses, and offer more support to students after the first year.

Ms. Perez, who served as a peer men-tor for three years, would like to see

the program help even more students. It currently enrolls 40 students for the full slate of services, including the summer program. Fifty more students receive help during the school year, in-cluding peer advising and access to the classes on topics like time management.

“I always joke with the directors that I’m going get my master’s degree and come back and run the program and see how much money I can get to ex-pand it,” Ms. Perez says. —BEN GOSE

MAY 22, 2015 D I V E R S I T Y I N AC A D E M E • T H E C H RO N I C L E O F H I G H E R E D U C AT I O N A11

“The people in the program, they became the tools that were missing in my toolbox.”

A12 T H E C H RO N I C L E O F H I G H E R E D U C AT I O N • D I V E R S I T Y I N AC A D E M E MAY 22, 2015

PATERSON, N.J.

AS a first-generation, low- income college student, Ashley Abregu faces out-size challenges. In this city, a destination for im-

migrants, where a quarter of the pop-ulation lives below the poverty line, there are many people like her.

But Ms. Abregu carries another big challenge, one that comes in a tiny package: Her name is Aubrie, and she is 3 years old.

Ms. Abregu, who was born in Peru and raised in the United States, is a single mother — one of about 1,800 parents who attend Passaic County Community College here. But among them, she is lucky: She and about 100 other parents got their children into an all-day child-care program run by the college, in a space adjacent to its main building. And because the program is supported by the local public schools — to give children a jump-start before entering kindergarten — Ms. Abregu pays nearly nothing.

Without it, “I don’t think I would be able to go to college,” she says early one Wednesday morning at the child-care center, where the walls are plastered with 3-year-olds’ renderings of sham-rocks and the Cat in the Hat. If Au-

brie weren’t enrolled here, her mother would have to pay about $200 a week for private day care and spend hours transporting her daughter on buses. Ms. Abregu relies on her own father for support; while she was pregnant, Aubrie’s father was arrested for drug dealing and deported.

Now majoring in the humanities, with plans to work in political cam-paigns and health activism, Ms. Abregu hopes her daughter will emulate her. “We come here, and she says, ‘Mommy, your school,’” pointing to the college, Ms. Abregu says. Since coming to the child-care center, Aubrie has been more social, more eager to learn. “Kids are going to follow whatever you do, espe-cially at this age.”

Ms. Abregu’s story is one often overlooked in higher education, yet it is more common than people assume. According to the Institute for Wom-en’s Policy Research, nearly five million college students — about a quarter of all undergraduates, and 30 percent of the community-college population — are parents. About 3.4 million of those student-parents are women, and two million of them are single mothers.

For those parents, child care is “the critical student benefit,” says Catherine Hill, vice president for research at the

Campus Child Care, a ‘Critical Student Benefit,’ Is Disappearing By SCOTT CARLSON

Parents on CampusNearly five million students in college are also parents. Most of them are women, and more than half of those women are unmarried. About 30 percent of students at community colleges are parents.

Source: Institute for Women's Policy Research analysis of Education Department data from 2011-12

Number of parents in college

Note: Numbers may not add to totals due to rounding of �gures used in analysis.

UnmarriedMarried

Student fathers

Student mothers

1,373,011 2,049,242

867,396 533,098

Total: 3,422,270

Total: 1,400,478

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MAY 22, 2015 D I V E R S I T Y I N AC A D E M E • T H E C H RO N I C L E O F H I G H E R E D U C AT I O N A13

American Association of University Women.

“Students say that if they don’t have child care, then the other support ser-vices just don’t mean that much,” she says. “If you don’t have child care, then you can’t go to tutoring or a mentoring program or any other number of sup-port services that schools offer.”

But Ms. Hill and others who study the needs of low-income women in col-lege have noted that many institutions, under financial pressure, are reducing, privatizing, or even eliminating their child-care programs, even as the num-ber of low-income and first-generation students in college rises. According to the AAUW and the National Center for Education Statistics, less than half of the nation's community colleges offer on-campus child care.

“The trend we’re seeing is that it’s declining," says Barbara Gault, execu-tive director and vice president of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, although she notes that hard numbers are difficult to find, as the issue is gen-erally not studied. Her research and in-teractions with college administrators, however, have uncovered a pattern: College officials say child-care pro-grams are too difficult and expensive to maintain, and, what’s more, they some-times have a cynical view of the service and of parents in higher education. One administrator told her that his college “can’t deal with everyone’s personal problems.”

Parenthood is “viewed as the irksome baggage that poor people come with,” she says. She and Ms. Hill note that colleges spend money on other student services and facilities that benefit small portions of the student population: counseling services, athletics, science labs. Child care should be seen as an-other such service, they say.

Still, at a time when community colleges in particular are financially stressed, a child-care center can be a burden that some administrators see as expendable.

IN 2009, Highline College, just south of Seattle, discontinued its 30-year-old child-care pro-gram when it was forced to cut $2 million from its $25-million

operating budget. Lisa Skari, its vice president for institutional advance-ment, says the college had been subsi-dizing the program at an annual cost of about $300,000 — paying $5,000 of the $8,000 cost of caring for each child there. “It was unfortunate, because in 2004 we had just opened a new child-care facility that was state of the art,” she says. Now a local nonprofit group is renting the center to offer child care, and the student government has set aside money to help subsidize the cost for some needy parents.

Brookdale Community College, in an affluent part of New Jersey, near the shore, has had a child-care center since 1974 that can serve up to 100 children.

But it has been a financial burden, los-ing $284,000 on an $800,000 budget last year. Administrators are now dis-cussing how to hand it over to a private operator.

Child-care professionals often crit-icize privatization, arguing that the profit motive can undermine teacher salaries and services. David Stout, dean of enrollment development and student affairs at Brookdale, says the college may have to continue subsidizing the

child-care service to maintain quality and keep it affordable.

At a child-care center at La Guardia Community College, part of the City University of New York, children not only get healthy food, socialization, and comprehensive lessons in literacy, but they also take advantage of some of the college’s facilities — taking swimming lessons in the pool, for example. But maintaining funding for the program is

“Students say that if they don’t have child care, then the other support services just don’t mean that much.”

Continued on Following Page

• Champion of Diversity Award from the American Association for Affirmative Action

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A14 T H E C H RO N I C L E O F H I G H E R E D U C AT I O N • D I V E R S I T Y I N AC A D E M E MAY 22, 2015

always a battle. Parents in the CUNY system organize bus trips to Albany every winter to lobby state lawmakers, asking them to continue giving CUNY nearly $3 million a year for its 18 child-care centers.

When asked about the value of the child care, the parents often deliver a remarkable message: The community college is not only helping them ad-vance socioeconomically; it is also set-ting up their children for opportunities the parents never had.

Lauren Patterson, a La Guardia student, didn’t learn how to read until he was 16 because he spent part of his childhood in the group-home system and bounced among various schools. His son, who is 2, has learned to rec-ognize Spanish and English words through the child-care center. “When we go home, we don’t watch TV,” he says. “My son picks up a book.” Mr. Patterson, a veteran, wanted to go to New York University, but there were no child-care services for students there, and private child care would cost

him several hundred dollars a week. Cheaper day-care services in the neigh-borhood plop the kids in front of a tele-vision all day. “I am not going to forgo my son’s education so that I can get an education,” Mr. Patterson says.

PASSAIC County Community College started its day care in 1999, after the Board of Trustees determined that affordable, high-quality

child care was a pressing need among students. The child-care center also

has a curricular connection: Students in the early-childhood-education pro-gram work there to get experience.

The college managed to pay for its services through a combination of state funding and various grants. In the late 1990s, preschool was included under a previous court decision that required the state to distribute school funding more equitably. The college formed a partnership with the Paterson Pub-lic Schools to subsidize the child-care program.

Linda Carter, an assistant profes-sor in early-childhood education and a founding manager of the day-care center, got more support from federal agencies, nonprofit foundations, and the state to pay for programs in litera-cy and nutrition, and for evening child care.

Ms. Carter says that before the day-care center opened, student mothers would leave their kids alone in the li-brary or bring them to class, which was disruptive. Some mothers would trade off babysitting duties in the hallways. When some single mothers turned up at college without their children, Ms. Carter wondered, Were the kids at home alone?

“It was scaring me to think what they were doing just to get to class,” she says.

Of course, many parents at Passaic County might still be in that position. The day-care center takes only 3- and 4-year-olds, and only up to about 120 kids. Steven M. Rose, the college’s president, says he hopes to expand the program in the next couple of years — but how the college would pay for that is unclear.

The hassles of running the child-care center go beyond the expense. Mr. Rose, as the official “owner” of the center, had to get fingerprinted and re-viewed by law-enforcement agencies. He is occasionally embroiled in dis-putes between teachers, touchy parents, and their toddlers. Some years ago, for reasons he still doesn’t understand, he had to replace the flooring in the cen-ter’s kitchen because it did not meet strict licensing standards. And closing the college in a snowstorm gets more complicated when kids need to connect with their parents.

Other challenges are more serious: If a child turns up at school with bruises, or if a court bars a relative from seeing a child, the involvement with the police and child-protection services that can result aren’t typically part of a college president’s job.

Given hassles like those, some of Mr. Rose’s peers at other community col-leges look askance at his aspirations to expand the child-care center, he says. “They think I am crazy,” he says. “But they didn’t have our demographics.”

For students who are parents, having a kid is another barrier to graduation.

“It’s all about taking away the obsta-cles,” Mr. Rose says, “and which ones we can mitigate, and which ones we can’t.”

In Many States, Campus Child Care Is Hard to FindSome 30 percent of community-college students are parents, but fewer than half of the nation's more than 1,000 community colleges o�er on-campus child care.

SOURCE: American Association of University

Women analysis of Education Department data

Percentage of community colleges offering child care, by state

90-100% 70-89% 50-69% 30-49%

Me.

N.Y.

Vt.N.H.Mass.R.I.Conn.N.J.Md.Del.

Pa.

Ohio

W.Va.

N.C.

S.C.

Ga.Ala.Miss.

Fla.

Tenn.

Ky.

Ind.Ill.

Wis.

Minn.N.D.

S.D.

Iowa

Mo.

Ark.

La.Tex.

Hawaii

Alaska

Ariz.N.M.

Okla.

Kan.

Neb.

Colo.

Wyo.

UtahNev.

Calif.

Ore.

Wash.

Idaho

Mont.

Mich.

Va.

10-29% 0-9%

Continued From Preceding Page

MARK ABRAMSON FOR THE CHRONICLE

Karen Perez, executive director of the child-care center at Passaic County Community College, plays with children. The college’s president hopes to expand the program in coming years, but it’s not clear where the money would come from.

to take formation, and finally, seeing them complete this very difficult task.

What are some of the challenges you’ve encountered when mentoring first-generation graduate students?

How a White Historian Nurtures Diverse Ph.D.’s

MAY 22, 2015 D I V E R S I T Y I N AC A D E M E • T H E C H RO N I C L E O F H I G H E R E D U C AT I O N A15

VIRGINIA S. YANS is well known for advising what she calls her “rainbow children” — more than a dozen diverse, first-gen-

eration Ph.D. students who have gone through Rutgers University’s history department. As a historian who spe-cializes in gender and immigration, she has trained many such students over the past few decades.

I am one of those rainbow children. We came from working-class or im-migrant families: African-American like me, white, Italian-American, Ar-gentinian, Hungarian-Filipino, Leb-anese-Cuban, and students who make their homes in Japan and Korea. Many of us entered graduate school feeling uncertain of our place in the academy and afraid that professors would not understand how important our identi-ties were to our research agendas.

The first and most obvious place I looked for a dissertation adviser was among black women, but surprising-ly, I found the climate and sensitivity I needed for personal and intellectual growth in this tiny woman who did not share my skin color.

“You don’t have to surrender your identity to mentor,” Ms. Yans says. “The objective of teaching is to step back and allow the student to discov-er their voice, not mine; their agenda, not mine. That’s not simply a matter of skin color.”

Ms. Yans’s students chose her, con-sciously or not, as our mentor because we found echoes of our own worlds in her thinking and acting, just as she had found them in the 1970s in her own graduate-school adviser, the famous labor and race historian Herbert Gut-man. Her own experience growing up as a child of working-class Italian immi-grants living in a 1950s jumble of class, ethnic, and race differences in Mama-roneck, N.Y., enabled her, perhaps sub-consciously, to recreate her neighbor-hood through her diverse students.

“I was one of a coterie of students who heard the call to arms from Gut-man and others of his generation to rewrite the conventional ‘big white man’ narrative,” she says, “redirecting chronologies and narratives away from war- and Constitution-making toward stories of working-class culture, slav-ery, immigration, women, sexuality, family, and popular culture.”

The following is an edited excerpt of a conversation with Yans.

What do you enjoy most about being a graduate adviser?

I enjoy working closely, one to one, with a student, encouraging him or her to allow his or her creativity and ideas

At a program such as ours at Rutgers, which has a competitive admissions process, ill-prepared students are rare. But several of the students I have ad-vised did have some issues.

Continued on Following Page

By STACEY PATTON

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A16 T H E C H RO N I C L E O F H I G H E R E D U C AT I O N • D I V E R S I T Y I N AC A D E M E MAY 22, 2015

Writing skills are the biggest issue. For foreign students, particularly Asian students who tend to have less English-language proficiency, lan-guage is often an issue.

I think confidence issues are prom-inent because students who are first-generation often come from back-grounds that are not typical for many students in the humanities. Given that I come from a working-class family, I have a lot of sympathy for them.

Can you talk about the challenges you’ve faced as a white adviser in-teracting so closely with nonwhite graduate students? Did you ever have any misgivings or things you had to push past to mentor diverse students?

Almost all graduate students I have known stand in awe of their profes-sors, less so if they come from Ivy or other elite schools and less so if they come from highly educated families. Several of the students I have men-tored had to learn how to negotiate dealing with such an “awesome” being as a university professor.

If there is a cultural or racial differ-ence, it becomes even more difficult.

So at the outset of the relationship

there is a lot of anxiety at play. Stu-dents have to build trust and confi-dence in you and in the relationship they develop with you. After the stu-dent feels safe working with me, my goal is to encourage him or her to take chances, to follow their own light, to believe in their own interests, to de-velop self-confidence.

I have to constantly observe my own interaction with the student. Am I doing the best I can to help this stu-dent realize his or her potential? Some students believe that they have to work with someone of their own ethnic or racial background. I don’t believe that is necessary. But that is the student’s choice. We are going to interact differ-ently if we are of different race, ethnic, or class backgrounds, just as we interact differently if we are of different genders.

I also try to make the student aware of his or her “own voice” and how it will be received within the academy and, if the student is lucky enough to find a larger audience, outside the academy. I may agree, for exam-ple, that women, gay people, Afri-can-Americans, Asian-Americans, and immigrants are discriminated against, but ranting about that is not convinc-ing. It is not the scholar’s voice.

Some students react badly to that

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MARK ABRAMSON FOR THE CHRONICLE

Virginia Yans: “When the student succeeds, I feel I have made an impact upon another human being’s life, and I am confident that the student, having experienced such a relationship, will do the same for his or her students.”

MAY 22, 2015 D I V E R S I T Y I N AC A D E M E • T H E C H RO N I C L E O F H I G H E R E D U C AT I O N A17

upfront advice. Each student has to figure out how and to whom they want to speak. The student must make that judgment, not me.

Some students cannot negotiate or don’t want to negotiate these kinds of challenges because, I believe, they are not yet sure of their identity. Or perhaps they are sure of their identity but want to put their energy elsewhere, not in working through interracial situations.

How did you overcome the chal-lenges of interracial differences be-tween you and your students?

Students want help. When they get substantial help and attention, when they see that a mentor is providing a “safe space” for them to work in, their trust and confidence grows, the rela-tionship flourishes. The student can concentrate on the work at hand in-stead of worrying about inadequacy and being misunderstood because of differences.

Both the student and myself feel invigorated when some intellectu-al or writing obstacle is overcome. We become closer working partners, and differences recede into the back-ground. Or, as often happens, learn-ing about differences in the mentor/mentee relationship causes the student to project this learning into their in-tellectual work and, in the case of my discipline, history, to obtain a more sophisticated understanding of differ-ence in the past.

What are some of the practical things you’ve done to help your first-generation students achieve success?

It is especially satisfying to work with African-American students. It’s like seeing generations of harm, all the impediments they and their an-cestors have suffered from, undone. I like working with students who are a challenge, that is, with potentially “high impact” situations.

When I work with white ethnic students, the children of first- and second-generation working-class par-ents who have never been to college, I totally get where they are coming from, and how they are suffering and worrying about whether or not they are good enough. That was my own experience. So if a student comes from a well-off or middle-class white family and graduated from an Ivy, they are already on fast-forward. I am happy to work with them, but it is simply not as challenging or as satisfying.

It is quite simple, really: When the student succeeds, I feel I have made an impact upon another human be-ing’s life, and I am confident that the student, having experienced such a relationship, will do the same for his or her students. It is a legacy we are participating in.

Practical things: generosity with time, patience, listening, working, sometimes endlessly it seems, with

writing and revising, listening with what one famous psychologist called “the third ear.” That means trying to figure out what the student is trying to say in his or her work but is having difficulties articulating.

Are there popular myths or mis-conceptions about first-generation graduate students?

Yes, I think that they are often seen as less competent, less able to achieve

than students who come to us already “polished.” Mentors such as myself like the “diamond in the rough” type of student.

My brother and I were recently dis-cussing the kinds of people he would look to hire at a very prestigious busi-ness-consulting firm.

He told me that he found stu-dents from Harvard less interesting than students from other high-end schools because the other students

were more diverse in their back-ground, more interesting bearers of interesting ideas.

What’s the most important piece of advice you would give to grad-uate advisers who are mentoring students in an increasingly diverse academic culture?

Get ready to spend more time than you do on the already polished gems. It is worth it.

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A18 T H E C H RO N I C L E O F H I G H E R E D U C AT I O N • D I V E R S I T Y I N AC A D E M E MAY 22, 2015

A COUPLE OF YEARS AGO, one of my students arrived during office hours with questions about the sociology course

I teach each year, “The Experience of Social Class in College and the Community.” But like so many other first-generation students I have taught, this student’s most pressing questions were really about her struggle to fit in at a university where most students, as well as staff and faculty members, could not relate to her experience.

She was upset after hearing a pro-fessor in another course criticize the work of those who cleaned campus classrooms, offices, and restrooms. And the workers who cleaned the grounds weren’t much better, he complained. No one challenged him as he pondered the inferior work ethic of those who did menial labor. Would students’ reactions have been different, I wondered, had the professor grumbled about the work-ers’ race or sex?

The student left class feeling invisible

and powerless. If she defended “those people” and disclosed that her family members did such work, would she put herself at risk? Would testing the professor’s authority hurt her grade? Would she be stigmatized in a class-room where most students were more affluent, “continuing-gens” whose par-ents had graduated from college?

I call stories like that “the first-gen blues.” They remind me of the Long-fellow poem “The Rainy Day,” which includes this line made famous by the Ink Spots in the 1940s: “Into each life some rain must fall.”

In my course on social class in col-lege, which I teach at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, we explore how first-generation students negotiate class terrain: how they might respond to dis-paraging comments about “white trash”; whether class differences are relevant during discussions of race or gender in-equalities; and what students might say or feel when they can’t afford to attend a movie with friends. This is tricky busi-

ness at Michigan because many students believe social class doesn’t exist or see it as a result of poor choices.

First-generation students can find a supportive place in a group called First Generation College Students@Mich-igan, which I’ve advised since 2008. It holds special significance for me be-cause I was the first and only member of my family to attend or graduate from college.

In an era when it’s unacceptable to complain about supposed behaviors and attitudes of women and minority-group members, few sanctions exist when working- and lower-class people are be-littled. “First-gen blues” circulate freely at selective colleges like ours, where in the fall of 2013 just under 11 percent of students reported themselves as first-generation, meaning neither par-ent had graduated from college. Those blues are shaped by three interrelated elements: finances, family and commu-nity concerns, and campus culture.

Money is a constant worry for low-

income students, whose parents can’t cover most college expenses. Neither can scholarships, grants, and work-study. Loans and significant debt are in-evitable. As high-school seniors, future first-generation students face inordinate difficulties in completing their Free Ap-plication for Federal Student Aid (Fafsa) forms. Summer vacations are spent working for wages instead of in unpaid internships that would add significantly to a student’s “cultural capital.”

Relationships with family members, meanwhile, are often complicated for first-generation students. Their parents can offer little advice about college life, and frequently worry about how their children might change while attending college. A son could start thinking differently when he comes home for the summer after taking a course like “Class, Race, Gender, and Modernity” (a course I taught a few years ago). Will Mom and Dad understand the need to move far from home to pursue a career? Will their daughter think she’s

Singing the First-Generation BluesBy DWIGHT LANG

OPINION

JASON GREENBERG FOR THE CHRONICLE

somehow better after graduating from Michigan’s law school and marrying a medical student whose mother is a famous cardiovascular surgeon? This high-achieving daughter may be silent-ly anxious about her own cross-class family structure and marriage: Will her working-class parents be able to com-fortably communicate with grandchil-dren raised in an upper-middle-class home or easily converse with the par-ents of their son-in-law?

UNLIKE the continuing-gens for whom college represents part of a seamless connection between middle-class pasts

and secure futures, first-gens experi-ence four years on campus as a portal to middle- or upper-middle-class lives. They may learn new middle-class be-liefs and ways, but deep inside they’re never entirely middle-class. They’re in-between and often uncomfortable. Many experience performance fatigue and are unable to publicly project the more-familiar, more-comfortable ex-pressions and behaviors of their veiled selves.

Upward mobility, openly celebrat-ed as the foundation of the American Dream, can produce emotional sep-aration between students and their working- class families and commu-nities. This complex sense of loss can generate insecurities, sometimes impeding academic achievements and requiring social and career adjustments during and after college.

The “blues” aren’t easily discussed on campuses like Michigan. After arriving on campus, first-gens easily recognize differences. They hear fellow students tell stories over dinner about trips to Europe or Asia before high-school graduation. Sometimes another stu-dent might innocently inquire, What’s Fafsa? When sympathetic continuing- gens ask what it was like to “grow up with nothing,” many first-gens cringe, wondering how anyone could think that the first 18 years of their lives — years spent surrounded by a loving, support-ive family — amounted to “nothing.”

Campus life for first-gens might in-volve a work-study job like peeling on-ions in back rooms of dorm cafeterias. As they save every dollar for books and other expenses, many first-gens can’t afford to eat out or move into costly off-campus housing because their share of rent would be too high. And how do they respond to theme-based parties (I have actually seen some in student neighborhoods) inviting revelers to come dressed as trailer trash or ghetto inhabitants?

Some first-gens just shake their heads and walk away from offensive social settings. Others might discuss hurtful comments with academic advisers, housing directors, department chairs, or other administrators. And some write thoughtful op-eds for their cam-pus newspapers.

Even when a college’s staff members or administrators act to confront hu-miliating words and actions, those end-less blues persist. Even in the absence of

overt classism, subtle class differences linger under the radar. Class is ever present for first gens, whether in the classroom, hanging out with friends, or back at home.

BUT those “first-gen blues” can also be a source of strength as students take risks, persist, meet others from different

social-class backgrounds, and cross boundaries to new places where they

can realize dreams and accomplish-ments.

Their considerable insights prepare them to live with purpose, and to be-come effective professionals, citizens, and parents who have firsthand experi-ences with class differences.

What became of my student? She graduated with honors and recently completed two Teach for America years working with preschoolers and their working-class parents in Tulsa, Okla.

She’s back in Michigan for graduate school, and regularly receives letters and notes of appreciation.

As that Longfellow poem tells us, “Be-hind the clouds is the sun still shining.”

Dwight Lang is a lecturer in sociology at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. His essay “Those of Us From Rio Linda” appears in Class Lives: Stories From Across Our Economic Divide (Cornell University Press, 2014).

MAY 22, 2015 D I V E R S I T Y I N AC A D E M E • T H E C H RO N I C L E O F H I G H E R E D U C AT I O N A19

A20 T H E C H RO N I C L E O F H I G H E R E D U C AT I O N • D I V E R S I T Y I N AC A D E M E MAY 22, 2015

MY MOTHER called me one day, crying. She had been taking a finance class for adult learners at a local

college after losing her factory job of more than 20 years. Though her work sifting through appliance parts on the dusty shelves of a warehouse in West Tennessee was grimy, and took place inside a sweltering metal hotbox with no air conditioning, she became emo-tionally unhinged when she was told the company was shutting its doors and relocating. Her reason for the tears

now, however, was something far more benign: Her teacher had told her to consult the syllabus for an answer to a homework question.

My mother, whose formal education went only through the eighth grade, doubted that her limited Internet skills would help her. Panicked, she did the only thing she knew to do: Call her professor daughter. She was sobbing as she pleaded, “What’s a syllabus?”

I knew the place my mother had toiled all too well, since she had ar-ranged a temporary summer position

for me at her factory during the few months of “freedom” I had sandwiched between my high-school graduation and first semester of college. I had turned 18 that summer and had begun working for just above minimum wage, pulling oily parts from dusty bins while classic rock was amplified throughout the building. My mother was my super-visor, and because of her almost tyran-nical work ethic and need to please, she was doubly insistent that I not make a single mistake. Not one.

I would pretend that the appliance

The Double Life of a Blue-Collar ScholarBy LIZ MAYO

JASON GREENBERG FOR THE CHRONICLE

MAY 22, 2015 D I V E R S I T Y I N AC A D E M E • T H E C H RO N I C L E O F H I G H E R E D U C AT I O N A21

parts were books and that the gray racks that housed the parts were shelves in a library. It was this game, along with my attempts to memorize every lyric to the most-played Led Zeppelin songs and my fantasies about traveling to some of the exotic places to which I shipped washers and grommets (Taco-ma, Wash., and Finland were equally exotic), that helped me to survive that summer in industrial hell.

Lunch was the most visually remark-able part of my day. Our lunch break was a fleeting yet glorious speck in time. A stringent 30 minutes taunted us with the knowledge that we had to return to our machines at the top of the hour. The stereotypical worker- bee whistle would blow, and we would all rush to the restroom to wash up. As the factory was staffed predominantly by women, the inevitable line snaked out the door. We stood behind the two insufficient sinks that produced barely a trickle and used the watered-down pink soap to scrub our blackened hands.

I tried to beat the system once and shirked the restroom line in favor of a picnic table in the sun. I grasped at my turkey on Wonder Bread and took a deep U-shaped bite down the middle. The grime from appliance parts left a handprint along the crust. From that day on, I begrudgingly stood in line to wash up, which left a scant 19 minutes or so to enjoy the sunshine before hit-ting those looming racks of parts again.

College, and with it my escape from a Morlock-like existence, couldn’t come fast enough.

THE LINK between my mother’s factory existence and that short summer of solidarity we shared began to sever as I

completed one degree, and then anoth-er, and then another. She would brag to her friends that her daughter was a “doctor of some sort.”

When I was finally ready to begin my first full-time teaching job, I

sought work at a local community col-lege. One of the first questions posed to me was how I would deal with the diverse population of low-income, nontraditional students at a rural college. I stepped outside my body and saw the young woman that others in the interview room saw: someone who was well groomed, well spoken, and well educated. Who was this

entity who had sprung from a GED- certified mother and a trade-school-trained father?

I realized in that moment that all of the digging through parts bins during that summer at the warehouse had not been for naught. In fact, every grimy piece that I had touched before it was shipped to some service company in Ohio or Indiana or Finland was an attempt to understand the part of my identity that exists in seemingly incon-gruous worlds — the blue-collar scholar.

I can’t be the woman with the college degrees without acknowledging that I’m also the girl with gritty nails who dug through the parts bins, who could feel her mother longing for something greater. But my mother didn’t have the ability to make her own aspirations as concrete.

Now I’m right where I need to be, right where I should be — teaching stu-dents like my mother at a community college. I don’t make assumptions about them based on their rural upbringings, but I also don’t leave them flailing by harboring arrogant notions about knowledge they should have before ar-riving in my classroom.

There is no syllabus for factory work. Factory life is dark and heavy and tough. I know.

Liz Mayo is an associate professor of En-glish at Jackson State Community College, in Tennessee.

College, and with it my escape from a Morlock-like existence, couldn’t come fast enough.

A22 T H E C H RO N I C L E O F H I G H E R E D U C AT I O N • D I V E R S I T Y I N AC A D E M E MAY 22, 2015

WE ADVOCATE for first- generation college stu-dents because we once were first- generation

college students. Our parents’ academic careers ended at eighth grade. To put ourselves through college, we worked jobs requiring hard, physical labor. We take it personally when low-income students, often the first in their families to attend college, are lured with loans, then left to flounder.

Many colleges have four-year gradua-tion rates below 30 percent, some below 10 percent. Yet most of their students have loans that must be paid, wheth-er or not the students graduate. We advocate that students avoid colleges with four- and six-year graduation rates significantly below their state’s aver-age. Low graduation rates suggest that administrators take students’ money aware and unashamed that most of the students will not graduate and may not even complete their first year.

Those schools are a discredit to aca-deme, undermine the aspirations of stu-dents and their hard-working parents, and financially cripple them. According to a report by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, student debt rose 12 per-

cent in 2013, to $1.08 trillion. Worse, that increase is being driven mostly by Americans with poor credit and few resources. Not only is that debt a fi-nancial time bomb; it’s also an abuse of public trust.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Col-leges could use tuition dollars to provide services with strong potential for increasing academic success and graduation rates. The federal govern-ment and a number of states have been changing their financial-aid formulas to include timely progress toward gradua-tion. For example, the Colorado Com-mission on Higher Education approved a new aid policy that increases financial awards when students meet certain credit milestones and decreases awards to institutions when their students do not graduate in a timely manner.

As Joe Garcia, Colorado’s lieutenant governor and executive director of the Colorado Department of Higher Edu-cation, put it, “We’re saying, Schools, it’s your responsibility to admit these students and provide services to help them get through.”

First-generation students often grapple not only with self-doubt and a lack of academic advice from family

members, but also with work-related responsibilities, inadequate writing skills, and other personal and intellec-tual challenges. Although those stu-dents’ academic potential is compara-ble to their more-accomplished peers, that potential needs to be nurtured through a consistent and cohesive sup-port system.

To help those students stay in school, administrators and faculty members need to work collaboratively in develop-ing a comprehensive retention plan that is well matched with students’ learning interests, strengths, and needs. While not a panacea, the following consider-ations can help:

n Use the backgrounds of incoming students to support their “cultural capital.” Involve them in setting goals that are interesting, meaningful, and culturally relevant to them, and that translate into their personal and pro-fessional lives. Professors and advisers should encourage students to engage in cultural activities that connect them to one another and to their college. Join-ing clubs and attending concerts and other events can build cultural capital. Those activities also support a sense of belonging, which is vitally important

Let’s Help First-Generation Students SucceedBy JOSEPH SANACORE and ANTHONY PALUMBO

JASON GREENBERG FOR THE CHRONICLE

MAY 22, 2015 D I V E R S I T Y I N AC A D E M E • T H E C H RO N I C L E O F H I G H E R E D U C AT I O N A23

for first-generation students to stay in college and graduate.

n Guide students to register for cours-es that reflect a balance of their abili-ties. For example, students with verbal weaknesses should not enroll in English, Western civilization, philosophy, and a new language all at once. Instead, their chances of success are increased when their course schedule reflects a balance of English with science, technology, art, music, or other less verbally dominant courses. Those students should also reg-ister for no more than four courses each semester and should take two courses in the summer session.

n Organize a panel of juniors and seniors from different backgrounds to discuss how they adapted to college life, including how they pursued resources and people to help guide them in de-cisions. First-generation students can join the conversation and express their specific challenges in higher education. As reported in a recent study in Psycho-logical Science, such low-key intervention has the potential to increase retention rates, helping students academically, emotionally, and socially.

n Support students’ writing efforts by (1) modeling the writing process for them; (2) meeting with them in small, short-term groups to share pertinent feedback; and (3) encouraging them to send email attachments of their first

and second drafts, then using the com-ment software to provide them with constructive feedback. Such support tends to improve writing, grades, and students’ academic self-esteem.

n Nurture students’ well-being. In a 2014 report from Gallup, in partnership with Purdue University and the Lumi-

na Foundation, college graduates were found to be more likely to be engaged at work if they’d had professors who fostered their excitement in learning, supported their efforts in an internship- type program, encouraged them to pursue their passions, and demonstrably cared about them.

n Require rigorous courses with clear goals that offer students readily accessi-ble and adequate support.

n Emphasize to students how crucial it is to attend class. In “The Empty Desk: Caring Strategies to Talk to Stu-

dents About Their Attendance,” Rose Russo-Gleicher, a social worker and adjunct professor of human services, suggests dealing with student absences directly — speaking with students pri-vately about their attendance problems and demonstrating empathy by listen-ing attentively and supporting their efforts to improve.

n Carefully monitor students’ engage-ment and progress, and intervene quick-ly and decisively if things aren’t going well.

Male students are particularly at risk of not completing their college educa-tion. A recent report from the U.S. Ed-ucation Department’s National Center for Education Statistics, “Projections of Education Statistics to 2014,” described the growing gender gap in college en-rollment and completion.

Administrators, faculty, and staff should never underestimate what a brave and intimidating leap first- generation college students are taking. Helping them succeed is a fundamental responsibility, and requires as much dedication and planning on our part as students are pledging on theirs.

Joseph Sanacore is a professor of education at Long Island University, and Anthony Palumbo is a novelist, essayist, and educa-tional historian. They both serve as student advocates.

STRONG FOUNDATIONSMAKEGREAT HEIGHTSPOSSIBLEThe University of Kansas is proud to announce the hiring of fi ve new Foundation Distinguished Professors. foundation.ku.edu

Emphasize to students how crucial it is to attend class.

A24 T H E C H RO N I C L E O F H I G H E R E D U C AT I O N • D I V E R S I T Y I N AC A D E M E MAY 22, 2015

DIVERSITY AND INCLUSION are clear priorities for universities across the country. Yet many campuses continue to strug-

gle with increasing the participation of historically underrepresented students in study-abroad programs. Here are seven ways to help engage and support students before, during, and after their study-abroad experiences.

1. Consider the short-term “appe-tizer.” Typically, students who study abroad have been introduced to inter-national travel and learning through family vacations or school trips earlier in life. They already have passports with multiple stamps, so they have had plenty of opportunities to overcome fears as-sociated with international travel and to benefit from broadened horizons, which resonate throughout their college life and beyond. Teachers, mentors, friends, or family members have served as cata-lysts, planting seeds of international pos-sibilities that most likely will bear fruit throughout those students’ lives.

We sometimes forget the realities of those who have not traveled that same path. They have not had the same ex-posure to international travel, nor have

they necessarily had people in their lives to serve as catalysts. Short-term study abroad can be a rich introduction for students with minimal international exposure. If the appetizer is rewarding, it is likely that those same students will consider a main course. Simply present-ing the option of short-term study abroad may lead to subsequent travel before and after graduation. And study abroad can stimulate all sorts of curricu-lar interests that might not have been piqued with-out it.

2. Team up with existing diverse groups. The perception of safety in numbers is a reality for many students from diverse backgrounds. Partnerships with existing campus communities when creating study-abroad programs are worth exploring. Connect with groups of diverse students who have common interests. Perhaps they are in the same organization or club. They

already trust one another, and meet regularly. They probably facilitate events, travel to conferences, do com-munity service, and take field trips to-gether. Connecting with their advisers or executive- board members to create a group study-abroad program might

help make such an experience more attractive for students without interna-tional experience.

3. Establish trust and cred-ibility. Both play key roles in moti-vating underrep-resented students to go abroad.

Find creative ways to build trust. Do you meet with students in spaces where they are already comfortable? Are you willing to step into their world before you ask them to step into yours? Build enough trust so students feel comfortable dis-closing their true fears and concerns about study abroad. Develop a diverse team to help students overcome those fears. Students gravitate toward faculty members and mentors who show that they are committed to students’ success.

Reaching out to underrepresented students is more than creating a flier with the smiling faces of ethnic-minority students holding backpacks and pass-ports. Understanding that group will help shape the administrative decisions we make as international educators. If the goal is to expand the number of low- income students who study abroad, it may not be a good idea to establish programs in countries where the cost of living and airfares are high. And how are people with disabilities treated around the globe? When you say to a student, “You will be OK,” how do you know? Being credible and trustworthy means paying attention to those kinds of details.

4. Dispel financial myths and elimi-nate sticker shock. Research shows that in many cases, studying abroad is more affordable than studying domestically. Scholarships that help underwrite study abroad are becoming more available at universities across the country, and crowdsourcing websites like ProjectTrav-el.com have recently emerged to help stu-dents raise funds through social media.

However, in many low-income com-munities, study abroad will be interpret-ed as a luxury, not an investment. The price of a plane ticket, for example, could buy a lot of essentials in some neighbor-hoods, where the ethos of cross-cultural discovery is not exactly prevalent. But when roughly 46 percent of Americans own a valid passport, international travel is a reality that cannot be avoided. It’s essential to explain to students (and their families, if possible) the value of study abroad; and providing financial-aid in-formation early may be critical.

5. Develop inclusive, culturally responsive curricula. Create course material that reflects a broad range of perspectives to which all students can relate, and material that engages students through the lens of their own identities. Promote respect for and ex-ploration of individual differences.

Students may be amazed to learn of the influence of the Moors on Spanish archi-tecture and design; exploring the history of gay rights in South Africa may lead to provocative questions about human rights at home. Culturally responsive topics should be woven throughout the study-abroad coursework and not presented as add-ons or afterthoughts.

6. Encourage faculty respon-siveness. Faculty members need to create “safe spaces” for dialogue and reflection, where students can openly discuss and write about what they are experiencing abroad. Guided and in-dependent reflection through the lens of one’s identity (race, gender, sexual orientation, class, religion, and ability) and how different identities intersect fosters a richer, more thoughtful study-abroad experience. Facilitators should make the identities of participants the focus. After all, gaining a better under-standing of the world requires a better understanding of ourselves.

7. Provide re-entry support. Re- entry for underrepresented students may be very different from the experience of students who typically study abroad. Perhaps none of their friends or family has traveled or studied abroad, so they might have a hard time finding people to share their journey with. Who can help them make sense of their experience through the lens of their identity, em-pathize with the obstacles they encoun-tered, and celebrate what they learned?

Campuses need to find ways to con-nect those students to a network of like-minded people. Consider creating special sessions and activities that appeal to the needs of specific populations. For example, women of color or first- generation students who have studied abroad might have very different sets of concerns upon returning. Collaborate with colleagues across the campus and in the community to develop group- specific support networks. Invite faculty members and administrators from de-partments that have a record of trust and credibility with those communities to help facilitate guided discussions.

It is the responsibility of our entire campus to ensure the healthy develop-ment of our students before, during, and after studying abroad.

Aaron Bruce is chief diversity officer at San Diego State University, where he has helped lead study-abroad programs in the Domin-ican Republic. He has also led programs in Mexico City for historically underrep-resented groups from various American universities.

7 Ways to Attract Diverse Students to Study AbroadBy AARON BRUCE

Build trust so students will feel comfortable disclosing their fears about going overseas.

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MAY 22, 2015 D I V E R S I T Y I N AC A D E M E • T H E C H RO N I C L E O F H I G H E R E D U C AT I O N A25

IN 2008, I became the first person I know of to transfer from Santa Monica College, an urban com-munity college with a student pop-

ulation of 34,000, to Amherst College, an elite, private institution of 1,800 students. At the time, I didn’t grasp the significance of that step. As a low-in-come, first-generation college student who had neither a high-school diploma nor GED, my gaining admission to Amherst was the result not just of per-severance, but also of luck.

Institutions of higher education are broadly viewed as engines of social mobility. But economic stratification among students attending different types of colleges is limiting that role. Wealthy students outnumber poor ones at the most selective colleges by 14 to one. A similar but reverse pattern holds true for the least selective colleges, including community colleges, which enroll 45 percent of all undergraduates in the nation. And while student com-pletion rates are very high at selective universities, they can be abysmally low at commu-nity colleges. Hence, many col-leges are simply not the engines of social mobility they could be.

Because of an unconventional upbringing, I never graduated from high school, and when I was 17, I began working full time. I was lucky to find a job as a live-in nanny for an affluent family in Santa Monica. Taking that job meant that I moved from an environment in which education was neither highly valued, nor even understood, to one in which education was of paramount importance and extremely well understood — es-pecially the value of a higher education. Having been raised to believe that col-lege was both too expensive for me and not crucial to my future success, my perspective on college began to gradu-ally change in this new environment.

Santa Monica College was in my backyard, and so affordable that I had little to lose by getting my feet wet with a few classes. (And it offered many sections of the most popular classes at convenient times.) Among California’s 112 community colleges, Santa Monica also has a reputation for transferring the largest number of students into the University of California system.

When I had enough credits, I decided to apply to Amherst because my boss, an alumnus of Middlebury, urged me to investigate liberal-arts colleges. Amherst

is among the few top liberal-arts colleges that accept a small number of commu-nity-college transfer students each year. I ultimately accepted Amherst’s invita-tion to attend because I liked the idea of having close interaction with faculty members, and the school’s financial-aid offer made it cost-competitive with the University of California.

ONCE I ARRIVED on campus, I found a welcoming, close-knit community of transfer students, who had come to

Amherst by way of diverse paths. They included many first-generation, nontra-ditional, and minority students, groups that are represented in greater numbers at community colleges.

Among my friends was a late-20-something who had slacked off in high school, started a rock band, and then spent his mid-20s tending bar to sup-port a globe-trotting habit. (He will soon be graduating from Yale Law School.) Another worked as a pest con-

troller and shoe shiner before matriculating at Amherst. (He is getting his Ph.D. in civil and environmental engineering at the Massachu-setts Institute of Technology.) Yet another grew up in an insular Ye-meni community

before running away from home to pur-sue an education. (She is at UC-Berke-ley studying law.)

My route to an elite college, and that of many others who transferred to Am-herst when I did, gives the impression that social mobility is alive and well in this country. In fact, the United States lags behind other developed countries.

Our elite universities have blamed the poor socioeconomic diversity at their institutions on a shortage of qualified low-income students. Research tells us that the problem is not with a shortage of qualified students but rather with a shortage of applicants. Nevertheless, many elite colleges simply have not designed policies or allocated resources to support a more diverse student body, one that includes more community-col-lege transfer students. That absence discourages talented students from ap-plying to such institutions. (I applied to only three private colleges, all of which made it clear that they welcomed appli-cations from transfer students like me.)

Community-college transfer students have shown that they can perform well at selective institutions. An evaluation

of performance at eight highly selective colleges that received funds from the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation to support community-college transfer students found that these students maintained competitive GPAs compared with “na-tive” and other transfer students and earned 95 percent of the academic cred-its they attempted (compared with 97 percent for other transfer students).

Although I would have been happy to go to a University of California campus to complete my bachelor’s degree, I’m grateful that Amherst was an option. While I was there, I learned a new lan-guage, had the chance to study abroad, received financial support to conduct independent research, and vastly im-proved my writing and thinking skills as a result of close interaction with fac-ulty members. I also had the chance to spend time with people from different backgrounds, making me better pre-pared to work in a diverse workplace, and I learned about opportunities that I would not have otherwise.

If selective undergraduate institutions want to provide first-rate educations, then they need to do more to support a diverse student body. After all, a discussion-based seminar in sociology or political science will not be nearly as nuanced with students who are all from the same income level as it would be with students from a range of back-grounds. Diversity enriches experiences outside of the classroom as well.

Elite colleges need to adopt trans-fer-friendly policies and make sure that community-college transfer students feel welcomed, supported, and inte-grated into campus life. The benefits of doing so will accrue not only to transfer students but also to the wider campus community.

Laura Huober is a joint-degree master’s student in the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and the Yale School of Management, where she is supported by a Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans.

Why Elite Institutions Need to WelcomeStudents From Community CollegesBy LAURA HUOBER

Many elite colleges simply have not designed policies to support a more diverse student body.

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A26 T H E C H RO N I C L E O F H I G H E R E D U C AT I O N • D I V E R S I T Y I N AC A D E M E MAY 22, 2015

DAN AND I met up recently at Izzy’s Deli, in Santa Monica. I had had a few drinks earlier in the afternoon — the pancakes

I ordered with a beer for dinner could have been a giveaway, but I don’t think Dan noticed my state of mind. I’m full of idiosyncrasies, so Dan must have chalked up the flapjack dinner to my being, well, different. Dan accepts me for who I am because that is a hallmark of a great mentor, and Dan is one of the best.

People like Dan don’t get the thanks they deserve. The role mentors play in the success of others is critical but often neglected. I don’t know why it is that the ability to overcome challenges and move forward is often framed as an individual achievement, when that is not usually the case. No matter how resilient or innova-tive people may be, those around them often help shape their success.

I first met Dan 10 years ago, in Mal-ibu — a city I had previously seen only

on my family’s black-and-white televi-sion back home in East Los Angeles. I had made my way to Malibu when I was 20, after serving in Iraq. An officer had learned that I would be traveling to California in a matter of days and asked me to transport an award for a student at Pepperdine University, where the officer had pre-viously taught. (The student had organized other Pepperdine un-dergraduates to help provide Iraqi children with school supplies.) When I arrived at the campus, I met with the officer’s colleague, Dan Caldwell — a Navy veteran himself and a professor of political science at the university — who took a liking to me and, at our very first meeting, offered to mentor me.

His commitment was sincere, and he immediately began to press me almost weekly, asking me what I would do next. I had no idea. I was working as a securi-ty guard, which paid the bills and even left a little extra sometimes. Dan was convinced that I could do more.

During a phone call on one of my overnight shifts guarding a Taco Bell near the Los Angeles airport, Dan pressed me again. By that time I had concocted a wild idea of where I wanted my life to go. It was bold

of me to tell Dan that my goal was to attend an elite university, given that I had barely scraped through high school and had had a few bouts with home-lessness growing up. And no one in my family had ever attended college. But Dan didn’t hesitate. He began to discuss with me how I could turn my idea into reality.

Dan is the one who introduced me to Brown University, where he had taught in the early 1980s. He thought it would be a good fit for me, given my interest in international relations and my status as a veteran.

But before I could even apply, I’d have to take many remedial courses at a community college, Dan explained. He didn’t sugarcoat how difficult it would be — he was fair in his assessment of my strengths and weaknesses, and al-ways gave me objective feedback, even when I didn’t want to hear it. That led to disagreements, of course, but Dan was unwavering in his support and kept encouraging me, even when I made decisions contrary to his advice, deci-sions that often resulted in a good deal of heartache for us both. For example, I once thought it would be a good idea to take more than a full-time load of courses at the community college, and my grades suffered. I learned my lesson quickly, and the next semester I adjust-ed my course load and saw an immedi-ate improvement.

But I continued to believe in Dan because he was one of the few who be-lieved in me, even when I considered giving up on myself. Later, when I almost quit graduate school (Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Govern-ment) because I didn’t think I was smart enough to get through a few dif-ficult courses, Dan told me it was time to take responsibility. “You’re lucky to be there, and you need to stop making excuses. You’re not passing because you’re not working hard enough. You

can work harder, and you know this, so get to it.”

I’m convinced that his steadfast sup-port — along with that of other men-tors and family members — is ultimate-ly the reason I made it through two Ivy League universities and achieved other accolades, including becoming a Brown trustee in a slot designated for younger alumni when I turned 27. I know his unwavering commitment to my success is also partly what led to my recent ap-pointment to the Council on Foreign Relations as a term member.

I AM GRATEFUL that I am both a veteran and a college graduate, es-pecially since so many friends from my neighborhood and from the

war were not so lucky.But that’s the problem.Knowing that there are people in

my life no different from me who have not been able to achieve their potential saddens me, whether it’s those who gave up on life and are no longer around, or those like my younger cousin Peter, who is perpetually in and out of cor-rectional facilities. I wish things had played out differently for them.

While I understand there are many reasons people don’t achieve their goals or fully realize their potential, the last 10 years have convinced me that men-tors matter — a lot. They are a crucial bridge to success. It is just misleading to think that individual effort happens in a vacuum.

Without mentors, many achievements would simply not be possible. Mentors are not always recognized or appreciated for their efforts; even so, I hope they continue their selfless service. Personal-ly, I know I will continue to face many more ups and downs. All of us do. We never outgrow our need for mentors. They can help us move forward through our most challenging periods.

Those times may be frustrating for our mentors as well. Giving advice only to see it dismissed can be maddening. But the opportunity to shape the course of someone’s life is powerful and re-warding, and most mentors will agree that they have no regrets.

But don’t take my word for it. I’m just telling you what Dan told me at Izzy’s, and from the looks of it these past 10 years, he gives great advice.

Eric Rodriguez is a trustee emeritus of Brown University and a term member at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is a recent graduate of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard Uni-versity and served in Iraq from 2003 to 2004 as a reservist member of the U.S. Army.

Mentors MatterIndividual achievement goes only so far

By ERIC RODRIGUEZ

I was working as a security guard. Dan was convinced that I could do more.

core classesbecome

core values.

MAY 22, 2015 D I V E R S I T Y I N AC A D E M E • T H E C H RO N I C L E O F H I G H E R E D U C AT I O N A27

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OF AMERICAN STUDENTS AT FOUR-YEAR COLLEGES DON’T FINISH IN SIX YEARS.

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Student Success: Building a Culture for Retention and Completion on College Campuses is based on a survey conducted by Maguire Associates, Inc., was written by Jeffrey J. Selingo, contributing editor at The Chronicle of Higher Education, Inc. and is sponsored by Ellucian. The Chronicle is fully responsible for the report’s editorial content. Copyright © 2015.

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