The Path of Books and Bootstraps

When Alex Garcia talks about his life, he absently repeats the words, “I can’t believe it.”

He says it when he talks about his life before--running with a gang, dropping out of school, getting arrested.

He says it again when he reflects on his life now, as a Glendale College student earning straight A’s. “Every day,” he said, “everything gets better.”

Garcia is the first in his family to go to college. As such, he represents a vast group that educators must pull in if the state is to fulfill its historic promise of universal access to college.

First-generation college students are made up disproportionately of minorities and immigrants, and tend to be older and poorer than peers from college-educated families. They are more likely to attend two-year colleges, less likely to get advanced degrees, more likely to get vocational certificates, and more likely to drop out. They are impoverished immigrants, single parents, students who fall into college as if by accident.

In short, they are archetypal community college students--especially in urban Los Angeles, where some colleges’ enrollments are 70% or more first-generation.

Such students are the trailing edge of a wave that is thought to have reached its peak when the World War II generation flooded the nation’s colleges, forever sweeping away the notion of college for elites. Even now, an estimated 43% of new undergraduates nationwide are first-generation, according to a recent study by MPR Associates for the National Center of Education Statistics. Of these students, the poorest and least prepared tend to gravitate to community colleges.

Their success is arguably a measure of the country’s social and economic progress. Reduction of the gulf between rich and poor, assimilation of vast numbers of immigrants and the elimination of racial inequities hinge to some extent on expanding college opportunities to historically excluded groups.

But coming from backgrounds that place them furthest from the reach of college, this new crop of first-generation students faces stiffer requirements and a more unforgiving set of economic stakes.

Colleges Focusing On Such Students

As California colleges and universities strain to increase diversity on their campuses without race-based affirmative action, they are paying more heed to such students, particularly at community colleges, where most minority students enter higher education.

Garcia is in a counseling program for first-generation students that has been expanded to several local community colleges in recent years. In addition, California community colleges may soon begin tracking first-generation status of applicants, with an eye toward ushering them more effectively through school.

The University of California, meanwhile, has agreed to try to boost community college transfers--a means of reaching out to such statistically disadvantaged students, without specifically targeting race.

Poor, Latino, a school dropout and the son of a single mother from Guatemala who didn’t finish grade school, Garcia typifies the first-generation student who is making it through college against the odds.

He also makes clear why ushering new groups into higher education involves more than recruiting. It’s a matter of finding the A students hidden among C students, UC recruits among high school dropouts, lost kids like Garcia who turn out to be whizzes at math. It’s a matter, said Scot Spicer, a Glendale College administrator, “of staying with students and not giving up on them.”

Wiry and often wearing a wide bad-boy grin, Garcia grew up in Atwater Village. He dropped out of high school in the 11th grade. His mother, a seamstress, lost her job and needed him to work.

He was a troublemaker and never a good student. A science teacher once pulled him aside to tell him he was smart and urged him to work harder. Garcia shrugged it off.

He drank and brawled with his gang. He shoplifted, violated his probation and spent time in juvenile camp. Asked to describe himself then, Garcia laughs, his hands tracing the course of an imaginary bowling ball. “Gutter ball,” he says.

When it came to discipline, Garcia remembers his mother trying to lay down the law: Don’t do drugs, she told him. Don’t bring home a pregnant girl. As for school, “She didn’t encourage me,” he said. “But she never told me not to go to school either. We just didn’t talk about school.”

He did get his GED, and briefly held a job as a shoe salesman in the Glendale Galleria earning $200 a week. “Now I see it wasn’t much money,” he said. “But then, wow, it was so much money.”

When that job ended, manual labor seemed his only option. But, “I didn’t want to break my back lifting boxes--I’m just 5-7, a little guy,” he said.

So, being short, he went to college.

It was a major turnaround, but not decisive. Rather, Garcia followed a pattern counselors say is typical of many first-generation students: He muddled along, barely passing his classes. To him, a C was good enough, more than good enough.

What happened next is a bit of a mystery.

Glendale College had recently started a program for first-generation freshmen called First-Year Experience. It is an outgrowth of TRIO, a federal program rooted in 1960s Great Society reforms.

The federal program recognizes first-generation students as a distinct group. Its simple formula of counseling and tutoring has a reputation for success, and avoids the political controversy surrounding race-based preferences. Its budgets have steadily grown.

At Glendale, the program was designed to target troubling patterns educators noticed in first-generation freshmen: low expectations, poor study habits and abysmal grades in the first semester.

Garcia embodied the problem. His counselors could tell he was bright. But his grades were low. They nagged him, but he seemed unmoved.

Then he pulled a B in a difficult sociology course. Something caught fire.

Spicer, who taught the class, said tutoring may have helped. But he thinks there was more to it, something to do with confidence.

Garcia “was someone who had been influenced by gangs. . . . He was pretty removed from the mainstream,” he said. “But I remember one thing: He said he could go home and talk about the class. He got excited about that, about talking about the world and seeing the world from an analytical perspective. I think that gave him a sense of power. . . . He saw that the world was interesting and he could talk about it.”

The next semester Garcia showed up in Ted Lavatter’s speech class and lingered afterward, eager for attention.

Lavatter sensed that “underneath all that baggage there was a real intelligence,” and took an interest. Garcia ended up getting his first A.

Bachelor’s Degree Is Key to Middle Class

And that was that. Garcia has been getting A’s ever since, even in challenging science and math courses. “It was in me all along,” said Garcia. “I just had to bring it out.”

First-generation status is not the only marker of disadvantage among college students. But it does offer a way to judge whether the system is providing opportunities for all groups.

Society is fast closing the door to middle-class status for people whose scholastic achievement is limited to high school diplomas or less, said Patrick Callan, president of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education in San Jose.

The earnings gap between holders of four-year college degrees and people with only high school diplomas has nearly doubled since 1979 to 71%, according to the U.S. Department of Labor.

The bachelor’s degree is the great equalizer. Although first-generation students start out much poorer than their peers from college-educated families, they earn comparable salaries if they get a bachelor’s, according to the study by MPR Associates of San Francisco.

“As a society,” said Ed Gould, a vice chancellor for California Community Colleges, “we can’t afford to lose these students.”

But they are being lost. Among first-generation college students, more than half didn’t have degrees after five years, according to the MPR study. Those students whose parents obtained bachelor’s degrees had far higher success rates.

“The hemorrhaging is unbelievable,” Callan said. “It’s something we can ill-afford.”

Attrition rates are sky-high among community college students in general. But the comparably high rate of educational newcomers is striking since the colleges were in some sense designed for these very students.

“This is an issue that cuts directly to our mission,” said Kyle Orr, a spokesman for California Community Colleges.

Exactly why first-generation students have a harder time isn’t clear. Financial, cultural and family conflicts are commonly blamed. For students who are squeezed financially and see few college-educated role models, the advantages of college may seem hardly worth it.

Meghan Chen, who counsels first-generation students at Long Beach City College, said she spends much of her time trying to convince them to aim higher.

“Personal fulfillment is low on their list,” said Chen. “Subsistence is higher. They are all about short-term goals.”

Among those Chen counsels is first-generation student Nicole Brown, 21, a physical education major from Carson. Brown, who is white, spent much of the year threatening to quit school to move to Texas with her boyfriend--a high school dropout--because, she said, “rent there is cheap.”

The plan made Chen grit her teeth. But she was careful not to show Brown her disapproval. In a series of counseling sessions over the months, she stuck to discussions of Brown’s scholastic options.

In the end, Brown surprised her. She won an unexpected $500 scholarship from a local garden club, and seemed thrilled when a reception was held in her honor. By the last week of the semester, she was no longer wavering about school, and was talking of changing her major to a computer field.

Another of Chen’s students is Raymond Carter, an African American from east Texas and the son of a sixth-grade dropout. A military veteran, Carter, 46, came to Long Beach with a passionate interest in medicine and hoped to become a nurse.

But pressed for money, with a daughter to support, he recently switched to an X-ray tech program, a lower degree, and not his first choice.

“It’s a scary world, let me tell you,” Carter said, adding with quiet emphasis: “I think it should be mandatory that everyone when they finish high school should go into college. Just to see what they can do.”

A factor that can hamper first-generation students is culture shock.

The MPR study found that first-generation students tend to be less integrated into college life, and studies have noted their feelings of alienation and loneliness.

Howard London, a researcher and dean at Bridgewater State College who interviewed hundreds of first-generation students for a Ford Foundation study, said he noticed “a sense of melancholy” in many, despite their achievements. They had a sense of having lost something, of relationships changing.

Choosing a Car Over an Education

David Lopez, a first-generation student at East Los Angeles College, feels different from many acquaintances in his working-class Latino neighborhood around Maywood.

Around there, “people say, ‘Four years? Screw it. I want a car,’ ” he said. “That’s what’s important in Huntington Park. The car you drive.”

Lopez, who plans to go to UCLA, said he once dated a local girl whose mother was enchanted with him because he had a part-time job to help support his studies.

It was a dead-end job answering phones at a local hospital. But to the mother, “I was working in this hospital, so I was a man,” he said, sounding amused. “It wasn’t what I was doing, going to college, or anything. I was a Man with a Job.”

For many first-generation students, the challenges are greater than for predecessors of yesterday because they have more educational ground to make up, argues Bob McCabe, senior fellow for the League for Innovation in Community Colleges.

Alex Garcia’s parents match an immigrant profile not very different from those of the 19th century; in a single generation, if he’s lucky, he’ll leap the distance to the jobs of the 21st century.

“The targets keep rising. And the students are from groups that are disproportionately under-prepared,” McCabe said. “It’s a very large task.”

For now, Garcia, at least, seems safely on his way.

He is far from his gutter ball days. He is engaged, does volunteer work as a children’s reading tutor, and plans to transfer to UCLA. He aims to be a teacher. He wants to own a house, and talks of going to Europe.

“I don’t want to go back to the way it was,” he said. “That was hard. This is easy.”

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Degree of Accomplishment

First-generation college students represent a vast group California must usher through the college system to fulfill the state’s historic promise of access to higher education. Such students, on average, fare worse than others in obtaining a degree. The statistics below show the percentage of college students nationwide who started college in 1989-90 and went on to receive a degree or were still enrolled five years later.