3,853 Degrees of Separation at UC Irvine : Education: Distinctions in class of ’95 include most first-generation graduates and carriers of heaviest debt load.

With joy, tears and the customary pomp, 3,853 students received degrees Saturday at UC Irvine’s 30th commencement celebration.

This year’s graduating class was distinctive in two ways, university officials said. It included the most first-generation degree recipients in the school’s history. This year’s graduates are also leaving school carrying the heaviest debt load.

“We have been waiting for this for hundreds of years,” said Lalo Garcia, uncle of 21-year-old graduate Marisa Herrera, whose parents are Mexican immigrants. His niece, who received a bachelor’s degree in history, is the first to finish college in a family that has historically worked as farmers and soldiers.

Such triumphs mean sacrifice, though. Said Liliana Wolpern, whose son Steve, 21, received a bachelor’s degree in comparative literature: “We owe more on his loan than we owe on the house.”

The school’s multicultural student body is drawing from many families of modest means who in the past have not had the advantage of higher education, said Randy Lewis, associate dean of students. As a result, he said, “the school has increasing numbers of first-generation college students,” many of them able to realize their dream only by borrowing heavily.

To most of them, like Steve Wolpern, there was no choice.

“We are credit-card and loan junkies,” Wolpern said. “We just sign it and don’t worry about it” until the bills come due.

Others expressed more concern about rising costs, which Lewis said have gone up threefold in the past 10 years while the availability of grants and scholarships has shrunk.

Carolyn Griffith, 21, one of the student commencement speakers, said that since she was a freshman four years ago, student fees at UC Irvine have risen from $841 a quarter to $1,450 a quarter.

Griffith, who graduated with highest honors in biological sciences and plans to enter a doctorate program at UC San Diego, said she was appalled to learn that California prisons will receive more funding this year than the University of California.

“There is a changing emphasis in our state we have to fight against,” she said.

Students received their degrees at six commencement ceremonies conducted throughout the day at Aldrich Park and the Bren Events Center and attended by more than 30,000 graduates, family members and friends.

UCI Chancellor Laurel L. Wilkening addressed several groups of graduates, congratulating and praising them.

“UCI has world renowned faculty and distinguished academic programs,” she said, “but our greatest achievement, our greatest joy is our students. They go forward as leaders of tomorrow creating new knowledge for the future.”

Speaking to management school graduates, multimillionaire businessman Peter V. Ueberroth instructed them that they must understand and respond to profound changes in society and in the world if they are to be competitive and successful.

“We in America have to change the way we work, the way we employ people and, most of all, how we raise children,” said the former baseball commissioner and chief organizer of the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles.

Ueberroth said that in 1960, 70% of the nation’s children were reared by a mother who stayed home and a father who went to work. In sharp contrast, he said, only 8% of children today have mothers at home full time.

“It has sure changed, and incidentally it is not going to change back,” he said to the class, which had a high female representation.

He also said the graduates would discover that businesses today must depend more on internal teamwork and learn to work in cooperation with government and the community.

Ueberroth, who headed the Rebuild L.A. campaign after the 1992 Los Angeles riots, urged the graduates to bring more services and businesses to the inner city. “Unless we can change it, it can be a cancer that will bring this country down,” he said.