Learning About College : Adviser Groups Ease Transition to Higher Education for Family ‘Firsts’

Victor Baez never gave college a thought until his senior year at Westminster High School.

That’s when a teacher asked students in his class how many of them were planning to attend a university--and Baez was one of the few who didn’t raise his hand.

“Nobody in my family went to college,” said Baez, 21, whose mother and father emigrated from Michoacan, Mexico. “My parents didn’t go to what’s considered high school in Mexico, but my mom noticed here that school is very, very important.”

Now Baez is in his third year at Orange Coast College, studying to be a doctor and planning to transfer to a major university. He and hundreds of other students around Orange County are the first members of their families to seek college diplomas, becoming pioneers for younger family members to follow on the higher-education trail.

Nationally, a survey shows the number of freshmen whose parents never went to college is decreasing; but as Southern California becomes more ethnically diverse, local university officials say their numbers are growing here.

“Our estimate in spring 1989 was that 24% of our students were first-generation attendees at college,” Cal State Fullerton spokeswoman Paula Selleck said. Since then, “we believe the number has grown.”

More than 11% of freshmen at University of California schools in 1993 had fathers who did not finish high school, according to UC statistics. More than 13% of them had mothers who did not finish high school.

These students have drawn the attention of educators, who say the students often have different needs. To track them, officials in the California State University system will begin asking about students’ family educational background on college applications for fall, 1995. The UC system began asking for similar information several years ago.

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Adviser groups for needy minority students--many of whom are the first in their families to attend colleges and universities--have been forming for the past three years at campuses such as Orange Coast College and Irvine Valley College. Groups such as Orange Coast’s Transfer Opportunity Program and Irvine Valley’s Making Transfer Easy become forums for students to share their common problems.

Students who are the first to go to college “don’t have the family support of siblings who have gone there,” said John Licitra, counselor and founder of Making Transfer Easy. “We’re like a family providing a role model.”

National programs such as Upward Bound have tried to attract these students to colleges since the 1960s. But students say it’s usually their own drive--not the urging of a program--that makes them take a chance and go to college.

Consider the case of UC Irvine senior Ralph Meza.

Meza, of Santa Ana, said he went to work full time processing loan papers at a mortgage lender after graduating from Saddleback High School.

“I was there maybe 2 1/2 years, and I knew I had to do something else,” said Meza, 26. He took a few classes at Orange Coast College, while picking up a second job at a music store to make ends meet.

Going to college full time started to make sense to Meza, but it wasn’t easy to persuade his cash-strapped parents. “Mom flat-out told me I was being selfish,” Meza said. “I never really took it to heart, even though we had huge arguments about it.”

Now that he’s looking at getting a master’s degree in counseling, Meza said, his parents are more understanding about his goals.

“My parents were always in debt, and they see a son or daughter as someone to contribute,” Meza said. “It’s not that they didn’t want something better for me--they do--but they can’t see the benefits (of college) because they never had it for themselves.”

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His parents, both Orange County-born former fieldworkers, helped him by providing a room when he started classes as a UCI psychology and social-behavior major. They also did not push him, and he credits his mother for giving him “mental toughness.”

Students’ access to education depends on whether their families can pay for college, or if they grew up in families where college was stressed--not just whether they’re Latino, white, black or of another ethnicity, said Meza. “It depends on individuals. My parents just couldn’t afford it,” he said.

According to a 1993 University of California survey, about 20% of Mexican American applicants to UC schools had fathers who had gone to college. More than 54% of Asian American applicants had fathers who had attended college, and nearly 74% of white students’ fathers had college experience.

The survey shows that income is a factor. The median income levels of the parents of Mexican American UC freshman applicants was $29,000 a year; the median income of Asian American applicants’ parents was $38,000, and that of white applicants’ parents was $70,000.

National statistics also indicate that students’ enrollment in college is related to their parents’ income, although scholarships are available to many low-income students. About 26% of U.S. college freshmen in 1993 had parents who make between $20,000 and $39,999 a year, according to a national survey. But only 17% of enrolled students have parents who make $19,999 or less.

Money was tight for Craig Harris, 27, when he got out of Santa Ana High School, but he knew he wanted to go to college anyway.

“I saw my brother graduate, and he didn’t know what he wanted to do, so he just went off to work and became a manager at a Taco Bell,” Harris said. “He was working really hard, and I said, ‘I don’t want to do that.’ ”

Harris went into the Air Force and became a weapons technician on F-16 aircraft to get college money and started at Irvine Valley after he completed his stint.

Many students could go to their parents or instructors for help, Harris said. Since he couldn’t, he took study-skills classes and did a lot of reading.

“Your parents don’t know how to help you study,” said Harris, whose mother and father are divorced. “They just tell you to study hard and study long.”

Now he is considering Pitzer and Pomona colleges in Claremont to study social psychology (“My mom thinks it’s like the greatest thing in the world,” he said) and he would like to counsel high school students.

“I want to tell them that college isn’t necessarily an ivory tower that’s really difficult,” Harris said. “In high school they make it sound like you have to be a god to survive, but you don’t.”

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Cal State Long Beach family counseling student April Harrell, 22, said some students with no family college background are deterred from college by myths as well as their parents’ expectations.

Harrell, a student assistant with Orange Coast’s Transfer Opportunity Program, frequently talks to confused students about financial aid. Many students do not know about loans and grants that could help them succeed, she said.

Parents play a role , Harrell said: “One girl here had parents who discouraged her and wouldn’t pay for her to come--they wanted her to be at home and get married.”

Neither of Harrell’s parents had more than a high school education, but she said she grew up knowing she would go to college. Her pastor urged her to go, she said, and her parents told her: “Don’t do what we did.”

Victor Baez said he was afraid of starting college without the advice of parents or siblings. But he found help from counselors at his high school, Orange Coast College and a doctor at a local hospital where he used to work as a clerk--who became his mentor.

Baez lives at his parents’ home, pays them rent with money he makes from a side job at State Farm Insurance and helps out around the house. But sometimes, he said, mom and dad don’t realize he needs time to study. He has a younger brother and sister, and his parents often ask him to baby-sit when he needs to study for physics tests.

Even so, he’s come a long way. It wasn’t too long ago that Baez was just another high school kid who didn’t know he had to take the Scholastic Aptitude Test to get into a major university.

“Now I know, so I tell my cousin to take the SAT and look into a prestigious school,” Baez said. “I’m encouraging her to get good grades and hang around the right people.

“I really enjoy helping her, because I didn’t have somebody like that.”

College Now More a Family Trait

Nationwide, the percentage of entering college freshmen whose parents have a high school education or less has declined sharply during the last decade. Orange County colleges say they are seeing more first-generation students as the county becomes more ethnically diverse. Percentage of freshmen nationwide whose mothers and fathers did not attend college:

Father did not Mother did not attend college attend college 1983 45.9% 52.4 1984 45.6 51.3 1985 44.0 49.7 1986 42.1 46.8 1987 41.3 45.6 1988 40.8 44.8 1989 40.7 44.3 1990 42.0 45.4 1991 40.0 42.8 1992 37.1 40.6 1993 38.0 41.1

Note: 1994 figures not yet available

Source: UCLA Higher Education Research Institute; Researched by ALICIA DI RADO / Los Angeles Times