Second Time Around

For Rikki Zee, the catalyst was her youngest son’s enrollment in college. For Tom Franco, it was corporate downsizing that left him nervous about his marketability.

At 53 (Zee) and 36 (Franco), they were primed to return to school.

They are part of what is by now a firmly established trend, of course--adults reentering college long after they assumed that phase of their life was over.

Cal State campuses up and down the state have seen the proportion of students age 25 and over increase from 39% of the student body in 1984 to 44% last year. Night students at Pepperdine University’s Graziadio School of Business and Management, whose program is taught at five education centers around the Los Angeles Basin, have an average age of 31.

Age alone only hints at the chasm between these students and their predecessors.

Zee holds down two part-time jobs just to afford the small Eagle Rock cottage into which she moved--with her two dogs--when she made her commitment to Cal State L.A. three years ago. Franco, meanwhile, works full-time in a corporate job that calls for him to travel frequently. He and his wife had their first child during his second semester as an MBA candidate at Pepperdine. As if that were not enough, his family moved into a new house, having outgrown an apartment.

Franco is organized and driven, but wonders how he manages. “I start my homework around 9 every night and work until midnight,” he said. “I’ve learned to tap resources I didn’t know I had.”

They are hardly alone in having dual and triple responsibilities: A quarter of CSU students have dependents, and 70% work more than 21 hours (up from just over half in 1989).

“Initially I thought that something was wrong with adult students: Why didn’t they finish the first time?” said David Heifetz, director of the Program for Adult College Education, or PACE, at Cal State Dominguez Hills.

Now he admires their commitment and would never, he swears, return to teaching traditional-age students. He bemoans the fact that only two Cal State campuses, his and the one in Hayward, have launched the PACE program, which combines off-hours classes with counseling and an orientation weekend for spouses. “Academic institutions are slow to change and it’s foolish,” he said.

*

The first time Rikki Zee walked into the Cal State L.A. library, she had been assigned a research paper for a speech class. But where were the index cards she remembered from her former college days?

“I was terrified . . . it made me physically sick,” she said. “I could not get the hang of the new computerized system.”

Assigned another paper last year, though, Zee found herself going “Internet crazy.”

“I guess I’m over it,” she said.

The first time around, Zee dropped out of community college after one semester, torn apart by her father’s death and a need to spend more time with her mother. She went to work, completed a vocational nursing program, got married and gave birth to the first of three babies. When money got tight, she returned to work in health care and wrote a grant proposal that created a terrific outreach position for herself until, as she put it, “Reaganomics kicked in,” killing off many such programs.

By then, Zee was a single parent and collecting unemployment. She volunteered at a friend’s music recording studio and ended up as its manager. In 1986, she moved to Los Angeles to work for another recording studio, only to be laid off again in 1993--at least with a “gracious severance” package.

Zee enjoyed being a stay-at-home mom for her youngest son, Tony, then a teenager. But in herspare time, she started writing, and soon was faxing opinion pieces across the nation. Publication of one (“Rap: One Letter Short of Rape”) in a music industry magazine got her thinking about writing for a living.

But how? The answer appeared during her son’s orientation at Cal State L.A. When Zee introduced one of her daughters--fresh from a master’s program--to an administrator who had just given an inspiring speech, “She said, ‘What was your degree?’ I said, ‘I didn’t go to college, but it’s been OK,’ ” Zee recalled. “She looked at my daughter and son and said, ‘Isn’t it about your turn?’ ”

Zee feared she could not afford college, but qualified for federal and state grants and loans that cover most of her costs. “I could not believe it: You mean something I wanted in the ‘60s can be realized by me in the ‘90s?”

In the fall of 1994, Zee attended her first college class in three decades, “scared as hell.” When one professor told her to consult her syllabus, she rushed home to call her college-educated daughter to find out what that was.

But Zee earned professors’ respect because she was willing to dive into class discussions from day one, when much younger students were muzzled by shyness. “I would tell them, ‘You’re paying tuition. As long as you maintain respect, you have the right to question. That’s what learning is all about,’ ” she said. “For them, it was kind of like having mom in their class.”

She even took a couple of classes with her son, though neither found that entirely comfortable, partly because she is so outspoken. “He knew I read all the assignments, so I made a pretty good study partner,” she said. “But in class I think it was a detriment for him. He never expressed it to me, but that’s just my mom’s intuition.”

*

Zee supports herself with two part-time jobs these days. One is an assistantship in Cal State’s admissions office, which takes her weekly to a Pasadena high school to counsel students who are interested in college. The other involves doing research--by listening to the radio--for Urban Network, the magazine that published her opinion piece.

That workload led Zee to decide against taking night classes. She tried it one semester, but wound up too exhausted to drive home. She now advises other adults considering college not to underestimate the value of the early morning insomnia that is more likely to occur later in life. “At 4 a.m., you can catch me reading my assignments,” she said.

Zee settled on a mass communications major. She is officially a junior, but has shunned some of the basic course requirements and so is uncertain when she really will earn her degree.

“My pursuit here is more knowledge-oriented than degree-oriented,” she said. “If this marriage leads to a degree, I’ll be ecstatic.”

*

Tom Franco, on the other hand, is intensely degree- oriented. That’s why he enrolled at Pepperdine’s Culver City campus in fall 1995. And that’s why he’s taking a full load this winter--the season when his work is particularly taxing.

He intends to get his MBA in April, whatever it takes.

Franco obtained his bachelor’s degree in economics and urban studies in 1984, at the University of Richmond in Virginia, and went right to work for Pitney Bowes Inc. in his home state of Connecticut.

Over the years, he rose through the sales ranks to become the equipment leasing manager for the company’s western region, in charge of spreading copiers, fax machines and Dictaphones through California, Nevada, Arizona, Washington, Oregon and Utah.

Though he had always aspired to a master’s in business administration, “as time went on, I got more engrossed in these jobs that had more responsibility [and] it seemed farther and farther away.”

Then a company restructuring in 1994 eliminated the job he had coveted for his next promotion. “A light went off,” he said. “I said, ‘I’ve got to get some more skills.’ ”

It became his New Year’s’ resolution in 1995. He did not want to sacrifice his commitment to Pitney Bowes, however, nor be unfair to his wife, Casey, who also works for the company. Because it has a liberal tuition reimbursement policy, Franco found he could pursue his dream for free--Pitney Bowes is picking up the $30,000 tuition and paying for his books.

Pepperdine allows MBA candidates to take up to seven years to complete their two-year degrees, and Franco had anticipated using four of those. But after his daughter, Giuliana, was born in March 1996, the day before his statistics final, he decided to attend full time “to get it over with so I could spend more time with her and as a family.”

Still, there were sacrifices. Franco takes one class that meets Monday night, another that meets Friday night and all day Saturday,every two weeks. He studies until midnight at least four evenings a week, sometimes starting just minutes after reading Giuliana her bedtime stories.

He and Casey spend most of their evenings tapping away on their laptop computers. “That’s our exciting life,” he said.

Although professors are sympathetic to the tug of so many responsibilities, Franco said, they generally insist that school be the priority. Delays in turning in papers and missed classes are frowned upon.

But Franco’s business experience made it easier for him to grasp academic concepts of marketing and corporate strategy. And already computer-literate from his job, he could use Pepperdine’s library to learn how to tap into electronic databases. Recently, while on a business trip to San Francisco, he hooked his laptop to the telephone in his hotel room and downloaded data for an assignment.

At first, studying for tests was taxing. Franco had forgotten how to skim through information in a way that was productive. But overall, he found himself--as Zee had--far more focused than during his first college foray.

“My father would say, if I’d only done this in high school and college, who knows where I’d be.”