A First Generation Story:  Intended and Unintended Consequences

Dr. Linda Pritchard 
Interim Director, Women's and Gender Studies
Eastern Michigan University

I was the first person in my family to attend college.  Neither parent nor any of my grandparents, aunts, uncles, or cousins had ever done so.  My story is both unique and universal: waking up in a foreign country where you don’t know the language. Learning the lay of the land produced intended and unintended consequences of being a first-generation college student.

My story is common for my generation.  I was born in 1945, five months before the first Baby Boomer and a month before the bomb ushered in the Nuclear Age.  My parents came of age during the Great Depression, proud they had graduated from high school.  College was only for the wealthy and a few gifted but poor students who were very lucky.  Not that my dad didn’t aspire to ‘better himself’ through college, but the financial and emotional infrastructure which would have allowed him to do so hadn’t been invented yet. That would come after World War II when the federal government introduced the GI Bill for war veterans.  But in a twist of fate perceived by my father to be cruel beyond measure—and a blessing by his family—he was not eligible.  To his undying shame, the army rejected his enlistment, because he stuttered.  When community colleges were founded in the 1950s to absorb the legions of new college students, he already had me, my two brothers, and his wife to support.  The best he could do in his lifetime was take one, not-for-credit accounting course at Lansing Community College.

But for what ever reason, he saw the future.  He was certain that his children needed to go to college.  I think it was because his beloved brother worked at the Fisher Body automotive plant.  My dad wanted his children to have more job opportunities than did my uncle and to have jobs where they did not have to get their hands dirty. Because my father learned to type in high school, he managed to get a job as an office manager. But he knew with more education he might have become a CEO or highest salesman or The Big Boss himself.

My father was not a ‘liberated’ man and did not have progressive ideas about the role of women.  My mother was a trained beautician when they married, but the first time she was too tired to go out dancing, he “put his foot down” and she quit.  He thought his responsibility—and that of husbands—was to bring home the bacon. Yet my dad thought college should apply to me as well as my two younger brothers. Why?  In case my husband died or left me, I would have something to fall back on to support myself! 

Regardless, I grew up believing that I would and should go to college.  But this was an ideal, not a plan of action.  At every level of my education, I backed into doing the right thing.  I did not take control of my destiny, because I had no idea what I should consider in order to get into the best school or the right program.  Once in, I felt like I had fooled someone to get where I was.  I didn’t think it was based on my own merit, and worried that I would be ‘found out.’  I suspect my story is common for first generation college students.

At every turn, I could have taken a dead-end path.  But I was lucky, and I understood much later that I had some things going for me.  I was a pretty good student from a stable, white, lower-middle class white-collar family.  I remember talking with my parents about where I wanted to go to college.  The deciding factors included a football team with a catchy fight song called The Victors.  My parents wanted a smaller, prettier school than the University of Michigan. But I insisted, without any other reasons than it was the “biggest and best” the state had to offer.  Someone at my large urban high school must have helped me fill out an application, but I don’t remember applying.  I know I did not apply for financial aid.  My acceptance letter said I had gotten a tuition scholarship from “alumni,” whatever that was.

Paying for college was a stretch.  But the scholarship meant I paid no tuition during my four years.  My mother had returned to work part-time in a local school’s cafeteria—against my father’s wishes, but at her insistence--and her minimum wage was saved for my room and board, the steep price of about $1,000 for the academic year.  I paid for books out of the $400 I made during summers working at Lake Louise Baptist Camp near Gaylord.  I also got a job in the cafeteria of my dorm (Mosher-Jordan Hall) for spending money. 

I went home for Christmas after that first semester saying I wasn’t sure I would go back.  I had undoubtedly just had the most stressful, soul-deadening, esteem-undermining experience could ever imagine.  I went to college understanding nothing about academic learning and even less about the diversity of people I was now around.  Most of my classes were in a lecture hall of 400-500 students. The first test I took, Botany 101, I flunked (I was required to use a key to name trees).  My roommate, a friend from high school, moved out without telling me—I don’t know why, and I have never seen her since.  The girls on my floor seemed so sophisticated and, well, rich.  I felt like a poor country bumpkin. I worked on the dishwashing line where scalding water sprayed food particles onto my uniform.  Three or four nights a week we had ‘sit-down’ dinners.  I was either one of the servers of the tables of eight, or was seated and waiting to be served by some poor slob just like me.  The ‘shame’ of having to work and knowing no one was a burden.  I stopped going down to dinner on sit-down dinner nights, and in fact, most nights.  Instead, I walked the streets of Ann Arbor around the university hospital until I was exhausted.

I do not know why I did not quit college.  The severity of culture shock I experienced my first semester at Michigan only happens when a student has no context in which to understand her experience, who knows no one who has ever been in this situation before, and who has no access to resources that might help.  Fifty years of having people like me in college have generated a host of student services that ease the transition of first-generation college students.  Today in universities with which I am familiar, a student service professional would have noticed my bewilderment and depression, and tried to help. 

Somehow I found the emotional reserve to return for my second semester.  I thought I failed everything, but gratefully, I got two Bs and two Cs.  More than anything, I did not want to let my family down.  I told myself that I had to go back.  During the second semester, my experience began to turn positive.  Two reasons account for the gradual turn-around.  One had to do with ideas and the other with an unexpected faculty mentor. 

I never adjusted to college very well socially, but I did find intellectual stimulation.  Some of the course work was actually intriguing—my psychology course where we read Walden Two and had to think about how we would feel if life was perfect for everyone; my political science course where I wrote a paper on democracy and the Vietnam War; and my American history course where we talked about the contradictions within Puritanism.  This kept me interested in studying, but did not mean I did especially well academically.  I bounced around trying to find a major.  My overall GPA ended up at about 3.2, only that high because I took some education courses. 

At the end of my second semester, a professor threw a life preserver to a floundering student.  At the time, I didn’t understand the pecking order of faculty.  He was not a professor at all, just a graduate student assistant teaching a subgroup of undergrads in my huge history course.  “Section” was the one time during the week that students were in a small class.  I don’t think I said much, but he graded our exams. I got my first A in that class. After it was over, he asked me to do some research for his dissertation.  Imagine, he paid me to do it!  I was thrilled, and though the money wasn’t really enough, I quit the hated cafeteria job, never to return.

I made my parents proud and graduated in four years. Mostly what they wanted to know, though, was what I would do with my degree?  What they meant was, what job would I get that would justify their sacrifices to send me to college?  First, my major was journalism, but got a C in a basic writing class. Then I tried Speech Therapy, so I could discover a cure for stuttering.  My first course was on the anatomy of the throat; I barely got a C.  By default, I settled on History.  I liked the field, but worried that the only thing I could do with this degree was teach.  I vaguely remember my father mentioning law school and my faculty mentor saying something about graduate school.  Like my father and mother, I had not yet stepped out of my gender and class position.  In 1967 I saw two choices suitable for a girl graduate without means: nursing or teaching. Since I get faint at bodily fluids, teaching was the only option I perceived open to me.  I did my student teaching at West Junior High in Ypsilanti, MI.

In 2001, I heard John Grisham, the popular legal writer, give a commencement address at Arkansas State University.  His advice to graduates was: Leave the country!  I did that, figuratively, when I graduated.  I took a teaching position in a location farthest from Michigan, from my family, and from my comfort zone.  My first job after college was teaching high school in Bakersfield, California.  I was in a school where most of my students had Spanish names (which I mangled), close to migrant camps and the grape boycott organized by Cesar Chavez, and a half-day’s drive from the Flower Power of San Francisco.  One night on my way back from playtime in Los Angeles, I heard that riots had broken out after the assassination of Martin Luther King.  All 20-somethings have similar stories of the real world impinging on life, but I absorbed my surroundings like a sponge.  When I was put on a list of Communist subversives for teaching Richard Wright’s Black Boy, I was proud.

I was having a great time growing up.  I do not know why I decided after only one year to inquire into getting a Master’s degree.  I suspect my father’s value of social mobility planted the seed, and my own impatience with teaching adolescents fertilized it.  I enjoyed the intellectual content of my history lessons far more than trying to get trapped teenagers to appreciate them.  Some of my colleagues were taking one course at a time at the local community college.  I wanted to get my Masters degree in one fell swoop so I could return to teaching at higher pay.  Where would I go to get this next degree?  I turned to the only person I knew who could help, my former graduate student instructor who was now an assistant professor in history at the University of Pittsburgh.  He told me it didn’t matter where I went to graduate school (untrue), but he arranged for me to be admitted to Pitt on a full fellowship.  I turned it down.  The risk I took makes me gasp.  I had faith that the offer would be extended another time, which only shows my lack of understanding of the system.  I did apply the next year, but was admitted as an alternate.  I don’t know the details, but they eventually got down to me.  I immediately accepted.  

Now I was a first-generation graduate student.  If you begin that way in college, then you are first-generation in every other related career move.  I had no more context for getting an advanced academic degree than I had for my undergraduate degree.  I only knew college degrees as a way to get more money in a narrow range of jobs held by folks of my station.  Yet I was now a graduate student in a program where I could get a Masters degree and maybe a Ph.D.   A doctor meant only one thing to me when I started, someone who helped sick people.  But I quickly embraced the new career path.  They were paying me to be a student and all I had to do was hold recitation sections for 30 undergraduates at a time?  I learned I could make a career out of thinking about the ideas I found interesting as an undergraduate and teaching students who wanted to be in college. Being a graduate student was way better than teaching captive 16 year- olds.  I thought I had died and gone to heaven.

My family thought I was going the other way.  They saw no reason for a young woman to go to graduate school.  I already had a perfectly serviceable degree in an honorable profession.  And my attitudes and behavior began to reflect the social changes of the 1960s and 1970s.  I began to have more rebellious ideas about gender.  My dress was less traditionally feminine; my politics no longer ‘safe’; and my language peppered with expletives.  My parents associated my changing values, not unreasonably, to the company I was keeping.

Graduate school was far more positive for me than my undergraduate experience.  I entered at a time when other nontraditional students (women, African Americans, working class, and more) were changing the face of higher education.  We formed posses to support each other, even as we were struggling to learn the unfamiliar rules of a new career.  Each of us responded differently.  I thought I needed remedial work, first in a complementary area of research (I spent a year in Berkeley studying Sociology of Religion), and then an international experience (I wrote a Fulbright grant to teach in Germany).  Consequently, it took me longer to finish my Ph.D. than others with more savvy.  I did not take my first university job until I was 35.

I remain envious of my colleagues who are not first-generation ‘everything’ in the university.  Surely it must have been easier for them.  But my experience gives me perspectives on the academy that I would not otherwise have.  I understand deeply and personally the things I study—gender, class, religion, and race/ethnicity—and their impact on the changing demographics of higher education.  I am strongly committed to regional comprehensive universities.  Most first-generation students find their way to them, because they are more student-friendly and less expensive.  My empathy for first-generation college students makes me more understanding of their difficulties, less tolerant of any excuses, and more determined to give them an uncompromised, high quality education.  I want to see Ph.D.-trained faculty create a learning environment that provides all students with choices I discovered by accident. 

My parents and I finally came to terms with the divisions between us that occurred because I went to college and they didn’t.  I don’t swear (much) in front of them, and they don’t ask me (any longer) why I never married.  Our votes in most elections cancel each other.  On one sense, it is just a stand-off.  But in another, we both have broadened our expectations and accommodated to the other’s needs and wants.  I know my 88 year old mother is proud of me, even though she doesn’t understand what I do or appreciate my worldview.  I have come to understand her history and appreciate her strength.

The historical period in which I grew up frames my story of intended and unintended consequences.  As I first-generation college student, I stepped outside the proverbial box and learned to navigate uncharted waters. Learning to swim makes you a stronger person.  I am grateful to my family and to the historical period into which I was born for the opportunity to do so.