Whew, this gave me so much to think about. I'm a first-gen student and a professor, and I'm struck, in writing that phrasing, of the present-ness of my first-gen identity. It's not something I was, once upon a time, when I first entered university; it's something I am and will always be. I work in higher ed (at a college with a 1/3 first gen population) and I'm still acutely aware of the cultural capital I lack that so many of my colleagues take for granted. The place I feel this most deeply is around art - I still struggle to appreciate it and to have the language to talk about it, while it's second-nature to many of the people I work with. Same with a lot of cultural touchstones around music and creative expression.
I went through the process that Melissa describes. College for me was a deepening of things I'd always loved, like reading and writing, but my larger family saw it as me getting "airs and graces." I was so confused by this - I was just doing things I'd always been doing, but as the first and (until recently) only one of my 32 cousins on one side of the family to go to college, the very fact that it was an option set me apart. I couldn't explain what I spent my days doing in any way that made sense to them; they couldn't understand why I'd *want* to do those things. I eventually went on to get a PhD, and that was a bridge too far - the protracted work of graduate school was utterly incomprehensible to people (my grandma in particular); the thing they understood and valued was that I was teaching, but they didn't understand why I made so little money doing it.
The feeling of not knowing or understanding my own class position persists. By a lot of metrics I am solidly middle class. But I grew up in a tenement house with a factory at the end of the street. We had no heat upstairs in that house; my parents didn't have an indoor toilet until I was 2. These things have shaped me profoundly, and yet I am assumed by so many people to have had very different experiences as a child and young adult. And when I offer stories from those years to others (be it many students or colleagues) I feel like I'm viewed as somewhat freakish.
All by way of saying that I need to buy this book! And I'm grateful to have spent time reading this interview this morning.
Oh man I am excited to buy and dig into this book!
When I was a teacher, virtually all of my students (I had 11th/12th graders) were going to be first gen college students. I am a fifth gen student - my family has been over-educated for literal centuries - so I worked hard to figure out what my kids needed. I was also lucky in how many of them kept in contact with me post-high school to tell me what they had experienced.
One habitus shift the author doesn’t address that I personally saw many students deal with was actually the opposite of the bumpkin now in ivy covered halls: the city kid who was used to everything being close who was now at a rural university. I taught in an inner city Ohio school, where my kids were all of color but the colleges they went to would be white and rural. These kids had never seen a farm, never used a washing machine that wasn’t at a laundromat, were used to having the so called “ethnic hair care aisle” be the entire pharmacy. Hair and appearance were particularly important to them. I had to start warning the kids at graduation: ahead of time, look online and find a barber that can do a lineup right, look for a braider who won’t break the bank, bring enough edge gel to last you a semester, are you doing your nails yourself or finding a salon? These kids were used to having a very different culture at their fingertips, and now were really going to have to fend for themselves in some new ways.
I always have mixed feelings about these articles because my own first-gen experience never lines up with them. My family was on public assistance on and off in my childhood but they still preferred French films to Survivor. The cultural generalizations about poverty get annoying. But avoiding that tangent, something from this interview that could really stand further investigation are all the attempted first-gen college graduates who ended up dropping out with massive student loan debut. I think there's probably a decent overlap between that cohort and our angrier voters. Understandably.
Well this seems to be the type of book that’s going to bring to surface all those “repressed shove them in a box in a deep dark corner of my mind” feelings, as I call the order in to my local bookstore lol! I was first-gen from a lower middle/working class family. In my hometown my parents were solid middle class and I was top 50 in my graduating class of about 800? My mother was a lite version of Hyacinth Bucket so I had some cultural capital and had been lucky enough to travel as a child. I thought I would be okay going to the private university I’d chosen. Man was I naive; my university was where the wealthy kids went if they weren’t able to/interested in going out of state to one of the actual Ivy’s, or top schools like that, but still wanted that type of education.
The tldr of my university experience; I spent three years of college watching this group and being envious? not of the wealth but the peace they had and the security net their family wealth gave them. I met my now husband my senior year and he was apart of that group of wealthy kids - we moved quickly in our relationship and I look back on those days proud of myself, but also sad, because of what I’ve called the “re-learning” that in some ways made me feel isolated from my community and all alone in his.
It’s taken over 10 years to just get to a somewhat okay mental place. I still don’t feel like I belong in our social circle, I dislike being the “success story”, I grew apart from friends because of my embarrassment of climbing the social ladder so rapidly. I have a hard time connecting with my extended family and it’s been this delicate balance between trying to help siblings and cousins climb the social ladder while also not coming across as embarrassed about the community we grew up in. Phew! A lot of feelings that I still need to work through and will probably pay for a therapist to send their kid to university.
I'm in the UK but this article gave me a lot to think about in our social context, as a first gen student in my working class family and someone who has recently moved back to the general area where I grew up, but now middle class. I'm interested in the idea of polish and what that looks like in a cultural sense and what's polished in one class wouldn't be in another. I used to work in South of England in an organisation filled with upper-middle class and graduates of elite universities and would frequently be critiqued that I was a bit blunt. I couldn't understand it, I'd never had criticism like this in my working career before, it was only after a couple of years of working in that environment that I understood the currency of passive-aggressiveness and being able to subtextually say something, it's as easy as breathing to those born into it - it's something I would never learn in a working class background (at least not mine) and my inability to do it (and unwillingness to learn) would always set me apart, I couldn't play by the rules of the game. Eventually I left the game. As did others from similar backgrounds who experienced similar situations, it's exhausting, I can totally understand why there may be high numbers of people who may gain entry to e.g. elite institutions, but leave through choice.
Yes, the exhaustion of corporate theater to someone not raised in this environment is what wore me down most. I could do the work -- well, but not the dance.
The idea of higher education as a people-changing institution is a new (to me) and interesting way of viewing my work. I am a graduate school dei administrator at an elite university with a center with dedicated staff to support first-gen students. This piece was surprisingly reassuring because most of the recommendations are things we are already doing. However, it makes me think about how we can be more transparent to students at the outset about how transformational the process of doing a phd at a place like ours can be.
As much as we have a lot of administrative supports in place, one of the biggest challenges of my position is how to develop processes for graduate admissions that account for wide differences in social and cultural capital. Everything from the questions we ask on the application to fee waiver requests need to be examined. The hardest part is convincing faculty to abandon deficit model thinking when evaluating candidates. When they can only admit a limited number of students, they view anyone lacking the traditional profile a "risk." Breaking that mindset in a moment of resource constraints is an uphill battle.
Someone from my college admissions office drunkenly told me at a graduation party that they felt like they’d taken a big risk on admitting me and that they were pleased it had “paid off”. I have such mixed feelings about that to this day… I was proud to hear it then but if I’d caught wind of it before graduating I think it would have really shaken my confidence.
It’s so frustrating because when someone with privilege doesn’t end up succeeding it is seen as an individual case, but the performance of anyone from a different identity reflects on their whole group.
Wow. This spoke to me so much. The neither/ nor feeling of not really fitting in from where i was from or my family and always feeling a bit on the outside at college. I definitely had the challenge of the first gen and the class alienation from a lot of my peers at my elite liberal arts school. I’ve processed these feelings many times over, but now having a child one going to college in 3 years reminds me how different her experience has been and how different it will be for her in college than it was for me. A few years ago AnnHelen asked for stories about class and first gen for a possible story. I just went looking for it in my email and it’s so aligned with what Melissa described in her book, here’s a part of that email:
Re: future education, it was always expected that I was going to go college (my dad got his HS equivalency in the US and my mother, who was 1st generation Italian (Sicilian) also only had a high school degree). My father didn’t teach me Italian because he thought I would speak with an accent and would be discriminated against. But this really alienated me from my family since my grandparents only spoke Italian. At family gatherings, everyone only spoke Italian. All my cousins either had been born in Italy or had spoken Italian at home so everyone spoke it except me. So I was left out of a lot because of this and felt like I couldn’t relate to my family. I spent a lot of time alone reading at family gatherings. Leaving for college and then never moving back home also made it worse. I have always felt like an interloper in my own family. I am not close with any of my extended family.
When I was applying for college my mother asked me why I wasn’t applying to Harvard but then also said that “you can apply to all these fancy colleges but if you don’t get any money you’ll go to SUNY and like it’ direct quote. I was lucky that I had a hs guidance counselor who really was supportive. She was in her early 30’s and I spent a lot of time in her office, and she took me even to visit two colleges that I had gotten into (and a lot of scholarship $; Wesleyan University and Connecticut College). I ended up going to Wesleyan. I was ‘lucky’ they had need blind admissions and I was poor enough to get a lot of aid. I graduated in 1994 with only 12k in loans, which seems absurd today. My parents didn’t understand a liberal arts college. My first year, my mom asked me if I was taking any business classes, and I had to explain that they didn’t have any. They also had expected me to either become a doctor or a lawyer. I worked from the age of 14, and all through HS I worked part time in a doctor’s office. I learned there that I didn’t want to be a doctor. So it was ‘assumed’ that I would be a lawyer. When I told my parents senior year I didn’t take the LSATs and wouldn’t be going to law school, my parents were very upset. They just assumed that was what I was going to do, even though we hadn’t talked about it in years. When I decided to get my Ph.D., my mom liked saying that I was a ‘doctor, but not the kind that ‘help people’. They definitely expected me to have a better life financially than theirs. I remember my mom saying to me, probably when I was 11 or 12 (so prime Regan years), that the US was becoming a country of only ‘rich people or poor people’, so you don’t want to be poor. And in many ways, I think she was right, economic stratification today is stark. Outwardly I am middle class now, but for me it always feels tenuous. Like it could be taken away any moment. Like I’m pretending. I don’t feel confident or secure in it at all.
I’m one of those first Gen students who took more than six years (and 3 colleges) to finish my bachelors degree despite having graduated high school as valedictorian, national merit scholar, presidential scholar. The distance between my tradition and my future was most difficult during my very brief tenure at the little Ivy near my family’s home. One weekend, some partying frat boys threw beer bottles at my brother’s truck as he drove past the campus. A few days later, I was complaining about it to some of my campus friends. They were bemused by my distress. “But you’re nothing like a townie!” they said. I didn’t know how to explain to them that whatever they thought I was “like,” I was a 10th generation “townie” who identified more with my brother and with my uncle (the student union custodian), than with any of them. I lasted there for 1 semester and 3 weeks … still “working poor” enough in character to make sure I left while my share of the semester tuition was fully refundable.
Oh wow, I didn’t expect this to resonate so hard. I dropped out of high school and also ended up at Reed (anthropology 05) as a non-traditional student a decade later in my mid-twenties. I wasn’t first gen, but I was on all the scholarships and worked multiple jobs the whole way through and felt very much like an outsider. I did find some peer support among the very few older students, but we had to find each other. This was an era when providing social and emotional support to students was seen as somehow taking away from the school’s academic focus. (9/11 was the second week of my first semester and the president at the time declined to cancel classes that morning because Reed was about the life of the mind and outside events shouldn’t affect our studies). Some supports existed (I had some friends in the first gen peer mentor program) but the prevailing culture was that you shouldn’t need anything outside your studies.
While there, I also became fascinated by higher ed policy and culture and ended up doing an independent study about it, writing about it for the school paper, getting on committees that helped me figure out how things worked. I never thought of it this way before reading this interview but I think I was trying to figure out how to navigate this strange environment and find the support I needed in the one sanctioned way—intellectual inquiry.
Thanks for this interview- I’m definitely seeking out this book — Melissa, I’m glad you made it through that strange hall of mirrors, and it sounds like they had started to figure out some more guardrails for nontraditional students.
I work at a public university in Texas, where DEI initiatives are now forbidden. I would be interested to hear from this author or other Culture Study readers about how the elimination of DEI programs has affected first-gen programs, who now have to shoulder the work that would previously been shared among several offices. Anyone?
This was a fascinating (and triggering) interview to read. As S Boym once wrote: "The nostalgic is never a native but a displaced person who mediates between the local and the universal."
I'd like to add one more layer to this polishing experience: being a first-gen (immigrant) student from an immigrant family. Many aren't always first-gen to post secondary education, but first-gen to the North American brand of it, with student life being marketed as a main feature, curriculum that isn't necessarily tied to a particular job outcome, and loosely outlined ROI prospects. It's vastly different from what the parents experienced and the cultural capital these students are often lacking is what's outlined in this interview plus plus plus (for some it might be speaking the language, for many it's sharing the cultural semiotics to build relationships on, etc). Because of North America's positioning as economically elite in the world, immigrating to the US or Canada is often perceived as a kind of social mobility on the global scale. The burden of this mobility begins early, first in loosing the country of origin with all of those ties and resources, then through entering a new school system which distances the student from their community and family further. Instead of French film vs Survivor preferences, first-gen immigrant students may have the additional challenge of reconciling geopolitical knowledge acquired in class with the experiences of their families who actually lived through those events, creating more trauma and distancing. And when one does end up achieving the social mobility the family gave everything up for, first-gen immigrant graduates are presented with opportunities catered to their peers, who have a vastly different understanding of the world. It's like the movie Inception...but make it "persistent unmooring".
While my parents went to college, they devalued education so I did not go to school or receive any kind of education other than basic reading and elementary math. Women did not need education according to them. When I decided to go to college, it was very hard. I had to start at a small school where I could go without a high school diploma or GED. I later transferred to a state school, and then later went to graduate school at an ivy. It’s very difficult and very lonely just like the article noted. I also had little support from family. The mental health struggles are very real, so I appreciate that the author is mentioning this. It’s a good experience but it’s extremely traumatic in multiple ways.
Great interview. This topic has been of interest to me my entire adult life. I first had language to describe when I read the book Limbo: Blue Collar Roots, White Collar Dreams, by Alfred Lubrano. To this day I don’t feel at home, in either the world I came from or the world I now inhabit. That of course, has been exacerbated by our political divide which often falls along class lines.
Thanks to Melissa Osborne for taking the conversation to a deeper level. And thanks Anne, for opening a window into the complicated reality of upper mobility and class.
I'm glad you mentioned Limbo. It's an excellent book on the blue collar experience in a white collar world. (I loved the way her referred to "island girls", women who had grown up in homes with kitchen islands.)
What an interesting interview! Up until last month, I was working in the college access world, specifically for low-income, first generation students. Can’t wait to share Polished with colleagues. I was a first gen, working class student, and non-traditional! It took me nearly ten years and 3 different colleges to graduate. My return to college was at a community college in NYC where I eventually received a full ride to transfer to an elite university and graduate at 27. During my experience as a student, what was missing for my first gen peers and I was MONEY. Even with a full-ride, we were non-traditional students (many of whom were partnered, some had kids they were raising, everyone was paying rent), so during undergrad I worked at least 60 hours a week in addition to attending school full-time to make ends meet. I didn’t have time to stop by professors’ office hours, let alone attend any programs that were targeted towards first-gen students. My relationships and networking experience suffered during those crucial years. I won $3k for an unpaid internship one semester and my supervisor wanted to keep me on (and the internship could have very likely led to a job after graduation) but I couldn’t afford to continue without being paid. When the dean of students asked me if I got the support I needed, I was very clear with him that what my cohort needed was material support, but that feedback was never taken seriously. It’s especially upsetting because the students from my scholarship program (anywhere from 2-5 community college students accepted per year) are consistently the highest achieving students in the entire school - multiple valedictorians, award winners, fellows of prestigious programs. I wish that university admin and college access non-profits took that material support more seriously. I believe education should be free, accessible to all, and provided for the sake of education alone but until we’re there as a nation, give poor and working class students more money!
The idea of higher education as “people-changing” vehicles is true but I think white supremacy in higher education is missing from this conversation and it would serve us better to discuss assimilation, particularly assimilation of first-gen students of color into whiteness. At my last job I worked at a STEM education non-profit (STEM ed and industries are particularly white supremacist and elitist) and there was a HUGE, constant, chronic disagreement between most c-suite leadership and the board, backed by the interests of donors, and programs staff and educators in which the former pushes Black and brown, poor, largely immigrant, first-gen students to attend Ivies, intern at places like Jane Street and Raytheon while the latter encourages students to attend schools that provide the the most financial aid, the most comprehensive support for students like themselves, and are known to have warm, welcoming communities on campus. A lot of people assume it is in students’ best interest to assimilate but the stress of assimilation alone (not even getting into relational dynamics with folks back home) causes many students to develop or worsen mental illness, fail classes, or drop out. I highly recommend Ebony McGee’s book Black, Brown, Bruised: How Racialized STEM Education Stifles Innovation if you’re interested in this particular topic.
This is small potatoes but the last thing I want to say is that I don’t think social mobility necessitates a change in tastes or interests! I grew up working class and it was very common to care about politics, world affairs, climate change, etc. I was a cinephile with very annoying, bougie taste as a kid and my tastes today are more or less the same! I found growing up working class, and in Arab immigrant community in particular, that we were always down to talk about the big things happening in the world. Maybe I’m trying to say poor and working class folks have rich, nuanced, varied opinions and tastes. Maybe because I had to work so much through college there was less of an opportunity for me to assimilate. Either way, a topic that I could ruminate on and discuss forever.
Spot on in terms of white supremacy. At the core is the idea that to be "polished" is to adhere to the norms of white supremacy. College is a wonderful thing, and I'm grateful for my opportunities but so many colleges haven't questioned this underlying assumption and untangled the norms of white supremacy from the idea of social mobilization. The one exception I would say is HBCUs, and I'm curious if she explores HBCUs at all in the book.
There are issues here I continue to turn over in my mind, a half-century after my freshman year in college.
I grew up in "urban" Wyoming (Cheyenne), attending the University of Wyoming on scholarship. I recall a casual conversation with a biology professor as church was letting out, where we were both serving as the "good to see you" post-service greeters at an Evangelical Baptist church across from the dormitories. He talked about this very thing, the way that college changes the students and makes it difficult for them to re-integrate with their home communities after graduation -- and the fact that many don't re-integrate, but instead, leave home for distant "opportunities." He said that the families complained about the way that college changed their kids: they were sent off as good Christian believers, and came home strangers, with strange, un-Christian ideas. He said that it made rural outreach for the University very difficult, especially in communities that had "lost" young people to Heathen ways.
As a land-grant square-state university, there was very little of the high-end social grooming that would take place at an elite private school: the reconstruction of social identity was more about what simply taking a cultural anthropology class, or a physics or geology class, does to the "verities" of rural Christian understanding of how the world works, and a fundamental misunderstanding (or even misrepresentation) of how higher education "creates opportunity" for the student. Education CAN create such opportunities, but the cost is that the student must change to be accepted in the world of larger opportunity, and they will no longer fit in the community they grew up in.
It's a one-way door.
I think of Von Eschenbach's tale of Parzival, whose mother sends him off on a journey to find the Holy Grail. It's a one-way journey. He sets out, prepared as well as his mother could manage, but his preparation is entirely inadequate, and he consequently fails at his first opportunity and suffers a long journey. When he eventually succeeds and becomes the keeper of the Grail, there is no returning: he is no longer the boy who set out.
For me, college was likewise a one-way journey away from home and family. That in itself was no great burden -- I never fit in with my family and peers, nor did I see any future for myself in my home town.
I personally feel that this attempt to democratize economic "opportunity" through higher education is a truly fundamental mistake. I recall C. S. Lewis writing that when his father was trying and failing to guide his son into some future, he finally decided he should try to make an academic of his son, as he was no good for anything else. When my father was a young man (1930's), a college education was held by around 5% of the population. Now, it's around 60%, yet the nature of academia has not changed fundamentally since the 1100's when the university of Padua was founded.
Now, the college-uneducated have instead become a very large unprivileged class, while a large number of the college-educated have become debt-slaves, as the opportunities they sought never materialized.
Growing up is a one way journey. Just about every culture has its traditions dealing with it. it might be college. It might be a first job. It might be marriage. It might be a walkabout. It's a common theme in story telling. Tolkien's Hobbit was a journey there and back again. His Lord of the Rings trilogy was not.
I was, I think, destined/condemned to opportunity/exile by my own nature and its extremely bad fit with the community I grew up in. But I don't think such alienation is natural for most people in most times. A lot of people seem to grow up in families and remain tight until their parents age and die, and then become the elders for subsequent generations.
Capitalism in our time drives everyone to "achieve" and "excel" and "reach for the stars" -- mostly propaganda so their efforts can be more easily harvested to the benefit of the wealthy -- but I think saner societies call for people to "contribute" and "retain" and "keep the hearthfire burning." Life is normaly a circle, not a pop-bottle-rocket.
I recall that being one of the core contrasts of the Parzival tale. Parzival had the classic hero's journey, starting as a fool and becoming a guardian of wisdom, but the story of Gawain, which is is intertwined throughout this tale, follows a horizontal path of birth, effort, adventure, nobility, and finally, an honorable death.
As is the case for Tolkien. Frodo was called to Mount Doom and the Havens. Sam went home.
Anne Helen, this was an excellent interview! And I am so glad to know about this book; purchasing it today. Much of this resonates so deeply, and there is a parallel experience for those who are second generation Americans whose parents are immigrants who may or may not have graduated from college.
My unusual experience is that my parents experienced social and economic mobility alongside my experience…so while our homes are now similar and I can go home, there’s not much beyond our nuclear family that we identify with… there’s a rootlessness that can be jarring, even if there are multiple people to share it with.
I wish every school would dedicate counselors who truly understood the experience; it’s the human mentorship that makes all the difference. It can not be replaced by AI.
Whew, this gave me so much to think about. I'm a first-gen student and a professor, and I'm struck, in writing that phrasing, of the present-ness of my first-gen identity. It's not something I was, once upon a time, when I first entered university; it's something I am and will always be. I work in higher ed (at a college with a 1/3 first gen population) and I'm still acutely aware of the cultural capital I lack that so many of my colleagues take for granted. The place I feel this most deeply is around art - I still struggle to appreciate it and to have the language to talk about it, while it's second-nature to many of the people I work with. Same with a lot of cultural touchstones around music and creative expression.
I went through the process that Melissa describes. College for me was a deepening of things I'd always loved, like reading and writing, but my larger family saw it as me getting "airs and graces." I was so confused by this - I was just doing things I'd always been doing, but as the first and (until recently) only one of my 32 cousins on one side of the family to go to college, the very fact that it was an option set me apart. I couldn't explain what I spent my days doing in any way that made sense to them; they couldn't understand why I'd *want* to do those things. I eventually went on to get a PhD, and that was a bridge too far - the protracted work of graduate school was utterly incomprehensible to people (my grandma in particular); the thing they understood and valued was that I was teaching, but they didn't understand why I made so little money doing it.
The feeling of not knowing or understanding my own class position persists. By a lot of metrics I am solidly middle class. But I grew up in a tenement house with a factory at the end of the street. We had no heat upstairs in that house; my parents didn't have an indoor toilet until I was 2. These things have shaped me profoundly, and yet I am assumed by so many people to have had very different experiences as a child and young adult. And when I offer stories from those years to others (be it many students or colleagues) I feel like I'm viewed as somewhat freakish.
All by way of saying that I need to buy this book! And I'm grateful to have spent time reading this interview this morning.
Oh man I am excited to buy and dig into this book!
When I was a teacher, virtually all of my students (I had 11th/12th graders) were going to be first gen college students. I am a fifth gen student - my family has been over-educated for literal centuries - so I worked hard to figure out what my kids needed. I was also lucky in how many of them kept in contact with me post-high school to tell me what they had experienced.
One habitus shift the author doesn’t address that I personally saw many students deal with was actually the opposite of the bumpkin now in ivy covered halls: the city kid who was used to everything being close who was now at a rural university. I taught in an inner city Ohio school, where my kids were all of color but the colleges they went to would be white and rural. These kids had never seen a farm, never used a washing machine that wasn’t at a laundromat, were used to having the so called “ethnic hair care aisle” be the entire pharmacy. Hair and appearance were particularly important to them. I had to start warning the kids at graduation: ahead of time, look online and find a barber that can do a lineup right, look for a braider who won’t break the bank, bring enough edge gel to last you a semester, are you doing your nails yourself or finding a salon? These kids were used to having a very different culture at their fingertips, and now were really going to have to fend for themselves in some new ways.
That is a brilliant observation, thank you so much for sharing it!
I always have mixed feelings about these articles because my own first-gen experience never lines up with them. My family was on public assistance on and off in my childhood but they still preferred French films to Survivor. The cultural generalizations about poverty get annoying. But avoiding that tangent, something from this interview that could really stand further investigation are all the attempted first-gen college graduates who ended up dropping out with massive student loan debut. I think there's probably a decent overlap between that cohort and our angrier voters. Understandably.
I definitely want to know more about this group as well!
Well this seems to be the type of book that’s going to bring to surface all those “repressed shove them in a box in a deep dark corner of my mind” feelings, as I call the order in to my local bookstore lol! I was first-gen from a lower middle/working class family. In my hometown my parents were solid middle class and I was top 50 in my graduating class of about 800? My mother was a lite version of Hyacinth Bucket so I had some cultural capital and had been lucky enough to travel as a child. I thought I would be okay going to the private university I’d chosen. Man was I naive; my university was where the wealthy kids went if they weren’t able to/interested in going out of state to one of the actual Ivy’s, or top schools like that, but still wanted that type of education.
The tldr of my university experience; I spent three years of college watching this group and being envious? not of the wealth but the peace they had and the security net their family wealth gave them. I met my now husband my senior year and he was apart of that group of wealthy kids - we moved quickly in our relationship and I look back on those days proud of myself, but also sad, because of what I’ve called the “re-learning” that in some ways made me feel isolated from my community and all alone in his.
It’s taken over 10 years to just get to a somewhat okay mental place. I still don’t feel like I belong in our social circle, I dislike being the “success story”, I grew apart from friends because of my embarrassment of climbing the social ladder so rapidly. I have a hard time connecting with my extended family and it’s been this delicate balance between trying to help siblings and cousins climb the social ladder while also not coming across as embarrassed about the community we grew up in. Phew! A lot of feelings that I still need to work through and will probably pay for a therapist to send their kid to university.
Thank you for bringing a smile to my face with the Hyacinth Bucket reference. Watched so many PBS re-runs with my parents.
I literally heard her voice answering the phone when I read Hyacinth Bucket "Mrs Bouquet speaking" 😂
I'm in the UK but this article gave me a lot to think about in our social context, as a first gen student in my working class family and someone who has recently moved back to the general area where I grew up, but now middle class. I'm interested in the idea of polish and what that looks like in a cultural sense and what's polished in one class wouldn't be in another. I used to work in South of England in an organisation filled with upper-middle class and graduates of elite universities and would frequently be critiqued that I was a bit blunt. I couldn't understand it, I'd never had criticism like this in my working career before, it was only after a couple of years of working in that environment that I understood the currency of passive-aggressiveness and being able to subtextually say something, it's as easy as breathing to those born into it - it's something I would never learn in a working class background (at least not mine) and my inability to do it (and unwillingness to learn) would always set me apart, I couldn't play by the rules of the game. Eventually I left the game. As did others from similar backgrounds who experienced similar situations, it's exhausting, I can totally understand why there may be high numbers of people who may gain entry to e.g. elite institutions, but leave through choice.
Yes, the exhaustion of corporate theater to someone not raised in this environment is what wore me down most. I could do the work -- well, but not the dance.
I love that phrase! "I could do the work, but not the dance." Helps me articulate what wasn't working for me in academia.
The idea of higher education as a people-changing institution is a new (to me) and interesting way of viewing my work. I am a graduate school dei administrator at an elite university with a center with dedicated staff to support first-gen students. This piece was surprisingly reassuring because most of the recommendations are things we are already doing. However, it makes me think about how we can be more transparent to students at the outset about how transformational the process of doing a phd at a place like ours can be.
As much as we have a lot of administrative supports in place, one of the biggest challenges of my position is how to develop processes for graduate admissions that account for wide differences in social and cultural capital. Everything from the questions we ask on the application to fee waiver requests need to be examined. The hardest part is convincing faculty to abandon deficit model thinking when evaluating candidates. When they can only admit a limited number of students, they view anyone lacking the traditional profile a "risk." Breaking that mindset in a moment of resource constraints is an uphill battle.
Someone from my college admissions office drunkenly told me at a graduation party that they felt like they’d taken a big risk on admitting me and that they were pleased it had “paid off”. I have such mixed feelings about that to this day… I was proud to hear it then but if I’d caught wind of it before graduating I think it would have really shaken my confidence.
It’s so frustrating because when someone with privilege doesn’t end up succeeding it is seen as an individual case, but the performance of anyone from a different identity reflects on their whole group.
This! And when you have enough privilege, your failure is almost looked at as charming, like you’re just too unique and special to fit the mold.
Wow. This spoke to me so much. The neither/ nor feeling of not really fitting in from where i was from or my family and always feeling a bit on the outside at college. I definitely had the challenge of the first gen and the class alienation from a lot of my peers at my elite liberal arts school. I’ve processed these feelings many times over, but now having a child one going to college in 3 years reminds me how different her experience has been and how different it will be for her in college than it was for me. A few years ago AnnHelen asked for stories about class and first gen for a possible story. I just went looking for it in my email and it’s so aligned with what Melissa described in her book, here’s a part of that email:
Re: future education, it was always expected that I was going to go college (my dad got his HS equivalency in the US and my mother, who was 1st generation Italian (Sicilian) also only had a high school degree). My father didn’t teach me Italian because he thought I would speak with an accent and would be discriminated against. But this really alienated me from my family since my grandparents only spoke Italian. At family gatherings, everyone only spoke Italian. All my cousins either had been born in Italy or had spoken Italian at home so everyone spoke it except me. So I was left out of a lot because of this and felt like I couldn’t relate to my family. I spent a lot of time alone reading at family gatherings. Leaving for college and then never moving back home also made it worse. I have always felt like an interloper in my own family. I am not close with any of my extended family.
When I was applying for college my mother asked me why I wasn’t applying to Harvard but then also said that “you can apply to all these fancy colleges but if you don’t get any money you’ll go to SUNY and like it’ direct quote. I was lucky that I had a hs guidance counselor who really was supportive. She was in her early 30’s and I spent a lot of time in her office, and she took me even to visit two colleges that I had gotten into (and a lot of scholarship $; Wesleyan University and Connecticut College). I ended up going to Wesleyan. I was ‘lucky’ they had need blind admissions and I was poor enough to get a lot of aid. I graduated in 1994 with only 12k in loans, which seems absurd today. My parents didn’t understand a liberal arts college. My first year, my mom asked me if I was taking any business classes, and I had to explain that they didn’t have any. They also had expected me to either become a doctor or a lawyer. I worked from the age of 14, and all through HS I worked part time in a doctor’s office. I learned there that I didn’t want to be a doctor. So it was ‘assumed’ that I would be a lawyer. When I told my parents senior year I didn’t take the LSATs and wouldn’t be going to law school, my parents were very upset. They just assumed that was what I was going to do, even though we hadn’t talked about it in years. When I decided to get my Ph.D., my mom liked saying that I was a ‘doctor, but not the kind that ‘help people’. They definitely expected me to have a better life financially than theirs. I remember my mom saying to me, probably when I was 11 or 12 (so prime Regan years), that the US was becoming a country of only ‘rich people or poor people’, so you don’t want to be poor. And in many ways, I think she was right, economic stratification today is stark. Outwardly I am middle class now, but for me it always feels tenuous. Like it could be taken away any moment. Like I’m pretending. I don’t feel confident or secure in it at all.
I’m one of those first Gen students who took more than six years (and 3 colleges) to finish my bachelors degree despite having graduated high school as valedictorian, national merit scholar, presidential scholar. The distance between my tradition and my future was most difficult during my very brief tenure at the little Ivy near my family’s home. One weekend, some partying frat boys threw beer bottles at my brother’s truck as he drove past the campus. A few days later, I was complaining about it to some of my campus friends. They were bemused by my distress. “But you’re nothing like a townie!” they said. I didn’t know how to explain to them that whatever they thought I was “like,” I was a 10th generation “townie” who identified more with my brother and with my uncle (the student union custodian), than with any of them. I lasted there for 1 semester and 3 weeks … still “working poor” enough in character to make sure I left while my share of the semester tuition was fully refundable.
I feel this reply fully in my clenched jaw and stinging cheeks even though class of ‘90 was a long time ago.
Oh wow, I didn’t expect this to resonate so hard. I dropped out of high school and also ended up at Reed (anthropology 05) as a non-traditional student a decade later in my mid-twenties. I wasn’t first gen, but I was on all the scholarships and worked multiple jobs the whole way through and felt very much like an outsider. I did find some peer support among the very few older students, but we had to find each other. This was an era when providing social and emotional support to students was seen as somehow taking away from the school’s academic focus. (9/11 was the second week of my first semester and the president at the time declined to cancel classes that morning because Reed was about the life of the mind and outside events shouldn’t affect our studies). Some supports existed (I had some friends in the first gen peer mentor program) but the prevailing culture was that you shouldn’t need anything outside your studies.
While there, I also became fascinated by higher ed policy and culture and ended up doing an independent study about it, writing about it for the school paper, getting on committees that helped me figure out how things worked. I never thought of it this way before reading this interview but I think I was trying to figure out how to navigate this strange environment and find the support I needed in the one sanctioned way—intellectual inquiry.
Thanks for this interview- I’m definitely seeking out this book — Melissa, I’m glad you made it through that strange hall of mirrors, and it sounds like they had started to figure out some more guardrails for nontraditional students.
I work at a public university in Texas, where DEI initiatives are now forbidden. I would be interested to hear from this author or other Culture Study readers about how the elimination of DEI programs has affected first-gen programs, who now have to shoulder the work that would previously been shared among several offices. Anyone?
This was a fascinating (and triggering) interview to read. As S Boym once wrote: "The nostalgic is never a native but a displaced person who mediates between the local and the universal."
I'd like to add one more layer to this polishing experience: being a first-gen (immigrant) student from an immigrant family. Many aren't always first-gen to post secondary education, but first-gen to the North American brand of it, with student life being marketed as a main feature, curriculum that isn't necessarily tied to a particular job outcome, and loosely outlined ROI prospects. It's vastly different from what the parents experienced and the cultural capital these students are often lacking is what's outlined in this interview plus plus plus (for some it might be speaking the language, for many it's sharing the cultural semiotics to build relationships on, etc). Because of North America's positioning as economically elite in the world, immigrating to the US or Canada is often perceived as a kind of social mobility on the global scale. The burden of this mobility begins early, first in loosing the country of origin with all of those ties and resources, then through entering a new school system which distances the student from their community and family further. Instead of French film vs Survivor preferences, first-gen immigrant students may have the additional challenge of reconciling geopolitical knowledge acquired in class with the experiences of their families who actually lived through those events, creating more trauma and distancing. And when one does end up achieving the social mobility the family gave everything up for, first-gen immigrant graduates are presented with opportunities catered to their peers, who have a vastly different understanding of the world. It's like the movie Inception...but make it "persistent unmooring".
While my parents went to college, they devalued education so I did not go to school or receive any kind of education other than basic reading and elementary math. Women did not need education according to them. When I decided to go to college, it was very hard. I had to start at a small school where I could go without a high school diploma or GED. I later transferred to a state school, and then later went to graduate school at an ivy. It’s very difficult and very lonely just like the article noted. I also had little support from family. The mental health struggles are very real, so I appreciate that the author is mentioning this. It’s a good experience but it’s extremely traumatic in multiple ways.
Good job. Neing the possibility of your future is letting someone else do the same
Great interview. This topic has been of interest to me my entire adult life. I first had language to describe when I read the book Limbo: Blue Collar Roots, White Collar Dreams, by Alfred Lubrano. To this day I don’t feel at home, in either the world I came from or the world I now inhabit. That of course, has been exacerbated by our political divide which often falls along class lines.
Thanks to Melissa Osborne for taking the conversation to a deeper level. And thanks Anne, for opening a window into the complicated reality of upper mobility and class.
I'm glad you mentioned Limbo. It's an excellent book on the blue collar experience in a white collar world. (I loved the way her referred to "island girls", women who had grown up in homes with kitchen islands.)
What an interesting interview! Up until last month, I was working in the college access world, specifically for low-income, first generation students. Can’t wait to share Polished with colleagues. I was a first gen, working class student, and non-traditional! It took me nearly ten years and 3 different colleges to graduate. My return to college was at a community college in NYC where I eventually received a full ride to transfer to an elite university and graduate at 27. During my experience as a student, what was missing for my first gen peers and I was MONEY. Even with a full-ride, we were non-traditional students (many of whom were partnered, some had kids they were raising, everyone was paying rent), so during undergrad I worked at least 60 hours a week in addition to attending school full-time to make ends meet. I didn’t have time to stop by professors’ office hours, let alone attend any programs that were targeted towards first-gen students. My relationships and networking experience suffered during those crucial years. I won $3k for an unpaid internship one semester and my supervisor wanted to keep me on (and the internship could have very likely led to a job after graduation) but I couldn’t afford to continue without being paid. When the dean of students asked me if I got the support I needed, I was very clear with him that what my cohort needed was material support, but that feedback was never taken seriously. It’s especially upsetting because the students from my scholarship program (anywhere from 2-5 community college students accepted per year) are consistently the highest achieving students in the entire school - multiple valedictorians, award winners, fellows of prestigious programs. I wish that university admin and college access non-profits took that material support more seriously. I believe education should be free, accessible to all, and provided for the sake of education alone but until we’re there as a nation, give poor and working class students more money!
The idea of higher education as “people-changing” vehicles is true but I think white supremacy in higher education is missing from this conversation and it would serve us better to discuss assimilation, particularly assimilation of first-gen students of color into whiteness. At my last job I worked at a STEM education non-profit (STEM ed and industries are particularly white supremacist and elitist) and there was a HUGE, constant, chronic disagreement between most c-suite leadership and the board, backed by the interests of donors, and programs staff and educators in which the former pushes Black and brown, poor, largely immigrant, first-gen students to attend Ivies, intern at places like Jane Street and Raytheon while the latter encourages students to attend schools that provide the the most financial aid, the most comprehensive support for students like themselves, and are known to have warm, welcoming communities on campus. A lot of people assume it is in students’ best interest to assimilate but the stress of assimilation alone (not even getting into relational dynamics with folks back home) causes many students to develop or worsen mental illness, fail classes, or drop out. I highly recommend Ebony McGee’s book Black, Brown, Bruised: How Racialized STEM Education Stifles Innovation if you’re interested in this particular topic.
This is small potatoes but the last thing I want to say is that I don’t think social mobility necessitates a change in tastes or interests! I grew up working class and it was very common to care about politics, world affairs, climate change, etc. I was a cinephile with very annoying, bougie taste as a kid and my tastes today are more or less the same! I found growing up working class, and in Arab immigrant community in particular, that we were always down to talk about the big things happening in the world. Maybe I’m trying to say poor and working class folks have rich, nuanced, varied opinions and tastes. Maybe because I had to work so much through college there was less of an opportunity for me to assimilate. Either way, a topic that I could ruminate on and discuss forever.
Spot on in terms of white supremacy. At the core is the idea that to be "polished" is to adhere to the norms of white supremacy. College is a wonderful thing, and I'm grateful for my opportunities but so many colleges haven't questioned this underlying assumption and untangled the norms of white supremacy from the idea of social mobilization. The one exception I would say is HBCUs, and I'm curious if she explores HBCUs at all in the book.
There are issues here I continue to turn over in my mind, a half-century after my freshman year in college.
I grew up in "urban" Wyoming (Cheyenne), attending the University of Wyoming on scholarship. I recall a casual conversation with a biology professor as church was letting out, where we were both serving as the "good to see you" post-service greeters at an Evangelical Baptist church across from the dormitories. He talked about this very thing, the way that college changes the students and makes it difficult for them to re-integrate with their home communities after graduation -- and the fact that many don't re-integrate, but instead, leave home for distant "opportunities." He said that the families complained about the way that college changed their kids: they were sent off as good Christian believers, and came home strangers, with strange, un-Christian ideas. He said that it made rural outreach for the University very difficult, especially in communities that had "lost" young people to Heathen ways.
As a land-grant square-state university, there was very little of the high-end social grooming that would take place at an elite private school: the reconstruction of social identity was more about what simply taking a cultural anthropology class, or a physics or geology class, does to the "verities" of rural Christian understanding of how the world works, and a fundamental misunderstanding (or even misrepresentation) of how higher education "creates opportunity" for the student. Education CAN create such opportunities, but the cost is that the student must change to be accepted in the world of larger opportunity, and they will no longer fit in the community they grew up in.
It's a one-way door.
I think of Von Eschenbach's tale of Parzival, whose mother sends him off on a journey to find the Holy Grail. It's a one-way journey. He sets out, prepared as well as his mother could manage, but his preparation is entirely inadequate, and he consequently fails at his first opportunity and suffers a long journey. When he eventually succeeds and becomes the keeper of the Grail, there is no returning: he is no longer the boy who set out.
For me, college was likewise a one-way journey away from home and family. That in itself was no great burden -- I never fit in with my family and peers, nor did I see any future for myself in my home town.
I personally feel that this attempt to democratize economic "opportunity" through higher education is a truly fundamental mistake. I recall C. S. Lewis writing that when his father was trying and failing to guide his son into some future, he finally decided he should try to make an academic of his son, as he was no good for anything else. When my father was a young man (1930's), a college education was held by around 5% of the population. Now, it's around 60%, yet the nature of academia has not changed fundamentally since the 1100's when the university of Padua was founded.
Now, the college-uneducated have instead become a very large unprivileged class, while a large number of the college-educated have become debt-slaves, as the opportunities they sought never materialized.
Growing up is a one way journey. Just about every culture has its traditions dealing with it. it might be college. It might be a first job. It might be marriage. It might be a walkabout. It's a common theme in story telling. Tolkien's Hobbit was a journey there and back again. His Lord of the Rings trilogy was not.
I'm chewing on this one.
I was, I think, destined/condemned to opportunity/exile by my own nature and its extremely bad fit with the community I grew up in. But I don't think such alienation is natural for most people in most times. A lot of people seem to grow up in families and remain tight until their parents age and die, and then become the elders for subsequent generations.
Capitalism in our time drives everyone to "achieve" and "excel" and "reach for the stars" -- mostly propaganda so their efforts can be more easily harvested to the benefit of the wealthy -- but I think saner societies call for people to "contribute" and "retain" and "keep the hearthfire burning." Life is normaly a circle, not a pop-bottle-rocket.
I recall that being one of the core contrasts of the Parzival tale. Parzival had the classic hero's journey, starting as a fool and becoming a guardian of wisdom, but the story of Gawain, which is is intertwined throughout this tale, follows a horizontal path of birth, effort, adventure, nobility, and finally, an honorable death.
As is the case for Tolkien. Frodo was called to Mount Doom and the Havens. Sam went home.
Thank you for sharing this. Your comment really spoke to me.
Anne Helen, this was an excellent interview! And I am so glad to know about this book; purchasing it today. Much of this resonates so deeply, and there is a parallel experience for those who are second generation Americans whose parents are immigrants who may or may not have graduated from college.
My unusual experience is that my parents experienced social and economic mobility alongside my experience…so while our homes are now similar and I can go home, there’s not much beyond our nuclear family that we identify with… there’s a rootlessness that can be jarring, even if there are multiple people to share it with.
I wish every school would dedicate counselors who truly understood the experience; it’s the human mentorship that makes all the difference. It can not be replaced by AI.