Living for Today, Delaying the Inevitable

My son just started college but he’s still skating on the edge of ambition, at least the traditional kind that says you need that degree.

Our biggest fights have always been about school. I want him to apply himself more; he wants me to back off. I harangue and make demands; he talks back and shuts me out.

Gradually, I discovered I wasn’t alone in my struggle. Some of my seven siblings, all with degrees from top schools, were having the same conversations with their teenagers. The new generation didn’t seem to aspire to higher education as much as we did.

Educators have also noted the trend among the children of college-educated Latinos, including their own. The generation that fought for affirmative action is raising kids who are blase about earning a bachelor’s degree.

“Sometimes I wish I could go the safe route,” said Miguel, my reluctant student at El Camino Community College. “Go to school. Be boring. Be like everybody else.”

American society dictates only one path to success, he said. The good-paying jobs go to those with diplomas, as we all know. The rest will hit economic dead-ends--unless they’re Bill Gates.

Miguel dreams of making it big as a professional skater, with his own brand of shoes and a home in the Hollywood Hills by the time he’s 26.

But that’s one in a million, I say. Miguel nods, knowing the risk. Some people are “irascible,” he says.

Irascible? Is that the right word? Miguel gets up to get his oversized dictionary. He sits on the edge of the bed and reads out loud.

Irascible: Moved by a desire for that which is attained only with difficulty or danger.

“How gnarly is that?” he asks. “Like seriously. That’s the definition of skateboarding.”

Skaters live for today, he notes. They don’t worry where the next paycheck is coming from.

Easy to say when Dad pays the bills.

Absolutely correct, my son agrees.

“I’m going to college to delay the inevitable.”

Which is what?

“Working.”

In Orange County recently, a big banquet to raise scholarship funds was attended by a ballroom full of affluent Latinos, many the first in their families to go to college. After all the tributes, they heard a warning from Armando Ruiz, honored for lifetime achievement by the Hispanic Education Endowment Fund.

Latinos continue to lag behind in college attendance, said Ruiz, a vice president at Irvine Valley College. Education levels have been improving for everybody, but the college gap--and consequently the earnings gap--for Latinos has not been erased.

He cited a study showing that many Latino kids are eligible to go to college but they don’t. All groups have “under-attainers,” noted the study by the Educational Testing Service (https://www.ets.org). But Latinos have a bigger share: 53% of Latino high school graduates could go to a four-year college, but only 31% do.

“I thought it was ironic that we were talking about scholarships for other children while our own were still at risk,” Ruiz told me later.

The study didn’t give me any easy answers for motivating Miguel.

“Students with high expectations perform well; students with low expectations perform poorly,” the authors wrote. “It’s that simple.”

Oh, no it’s not. If my expectations for Miguel were any higher we’d both get nose bleeds. And you can say the same for Ray Talavera and his son, Adrian, 21.

Talavera is a veteran counselor at El Camino, where Ruiz also worked for 20 years. He raised his son in the seaside suburb of Seal Beach, where Adrian, a self-described slacker, found surfing more interesting than studying.

The new generation is spoiled by success, says Talavera, son of an uneducated railroad worker. “These kids have it all. They can enjoy the fruits of the labor of their parents, and they take their opportunities for granted.”

A far cry from his youth in Pico Rivera, growing up alongside the tracks in spartan barracks with concrete floors and no running water or electricity. Of his four siblings, Talavera was the only one to get a college degree, his ticket out of poverty.

Adrian has taken almost four years to complete community college, but now he wants to be a teacher like his mother, Eulalia. He sees friends about to get their degrees and thinks: “You need to do something with your life.”

Miguel has also seen his close friends move away to universities.

“Good for them,” my son says sincerely. “The reason you go to college is to find your passion.”

“And?”

“I’ve already found mine.”

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Agustin Gurza’s column appears Tuesday. Readers can reach Gurza at (714) 966-7712 or agustin.gurza@latimes.com