Sunday, April 10, 2011

The “working class” girls point of view on higher education – Jennifer

In Renny Christopher’s chapter “New Working-Class Studies in Higher Education” she discusses the challenges facing first generation college students that I would like to address. What Renny discusses are many facts and figures that obviously are meant to represent the majority but what about the minority? I believe I am that minority. I am a first generation college student as are many of my family and friends. In my family my mother was one of six children and only one brother went to college. My father was one of four and only one of his brothers went to college as well. In my family now everyone of my generation has gone to college. It seems the majority to Christopher is not the majority I am familiar with. I went to a high school that presumed the vast majority of us would go to college and truthfully anyone and everyone I knew in high school did go to college. My high school was made up of working class and middle class families, yet that did not divide who did and did not go to college. I, like most of my peers, attended a four-year institution. I was not under prepared because my parents did not attend college as Christopher suggests. I never felt out of place or ostracized as Christopher concludes of many first generation college students entering four year institutions: “it demands that students from the working class deny their past, dissociate themselves from their families, and remake themselves in its own image in order to ‘earn’ a place within it” (216). I never felt this way about my college experience. My parents and family were always supportive of my time in college. I never felt I had to remake myself simply because I was attending college. I was remade because I attended college; I found who and what I wanted to be.

As I was reading Christopher’s article I felt the complete opposite of everything she was concluding and saying. I felt more included and where I should have been in college. College, to me, was an equalizer. I was meant to be in a particular class just as much as the person sitting next to me and it didn’t matter their background or mine. I met my best friend in college and she, like her husband who also graduated with us, came from families where they were first generation college students. They were also very prepared for college and thrived at Robert Morris just as I did. Maybe because I come from Christopher’s stereotypical working class, first generation college student type I feel more inclined to want to see college not separated by these barriers she refers to but joined. If you tell these students statistically they are less prepared for college is that going to encourage them to succeed? If you present college as a clean slate for everyone no matter background and economic conditions will that encourage them more to succeed? All I know is whether or not I’m the minority in the majority why can’t everyone who is a first generation college student be taught to see college as I saw it? To me that will help them succeed.

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