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Chapter 1. Motivation, Means, and Method: Studying Educational Attainment
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3 Chapter 1 Motivation, Means, and Method: Studying Educational Attainment While growing up black, female, poor, southern, without strong family support, and during the Great Depression effectively ensured that my mother would not become college educated, those conditions did not prevent her from enhancing the educational levels and lifestyle of her children . Many others of my generation were not so lucky in that no one in their families switched the track on their behalf. Yet possessing what very well may be the same determination and drive that compelled my mother, and being born much later—in some cases three or four decades later—than she was, the extraordinary individuals whom I interviewed for this book were able to rise above formidable obstacles to complete a college degree, the first in the histories of their families to do so. By switching the track for themselves, they have undoubtedly affected the upward mobility—educationally, socially, and economically—of their descendants for generations to come. In addition, they have influenced others along the way to become agents of positive change in their own lives and in the lives of their progeny by becoming first-generation college graduates. This book, while it does not address structural or physiological attributes of the participants, attempts to show how these remarkable people managed to achieve their great feats. My childhood desire to understand why education would be as important to my mother (in whose family no one had ever completed elementary school) as to my father (whose eldest sister attended secondary school in the 1920s and became a teacher) was given added poignancy when I expanded my circle of family. Right after my college graduation in June, 1966, I married a firstgeneration college student and lived with his family for the summer. I was struck by the fact that only two of my husband’s seven siblings had completed high school and that his family was vociferous in its denigration of the college diploma as “just a piece of paper.” My mother-in-law informed me often, apropos of nothing, and always within my husband’s hearing, that he wasn’t so smart and had gotten a D in high school German. I added to my list of 4 Freedom’s Genesis reasons to admire my young husband his will to pursue a college degree in spite of a familial environment that is downright hostile to higher education. I also began questioning my husband’s two younger sisters about why they, unlike their brother, had not aspired to go to college. In 1996 I began my research with a question that had figured prominently in my ruminations for thirty years: Why do people who have little to no support for doing so break with tradition by becoming the first in their families to attend college and, after graduation, intentional catalysts for similar metamorphoses in others’ lives? Why wouldn’t they take the easier course of maintaining the educational status quo that is their ancestral inheritance, thereby keeping calumny off their heads at home and abroad and peace in the family? As Huckleberry Finn, that uneducated denizen of American fiction so aptly concluded , when you are sharing close quarters with those more powerful and less tolerant than you, “... what you want, above all things ... is for everybody to be satisfied, and feel right and kind towards the others” (Clemens 1977, 102). Review of the Literature I was not able to find a wealth of answers to my question in the literature on first-generation college students. Since first-generation college graduates’ short- and long-range effects upon society appear to be dramatically significant , I was surprised that so little data has been collected about them. For instance, no one knows how many students who have attended or are currently enrolled in colleges and universities in the United States are first-generation college students, just as no one knows how many of the nation’s college graduates have been the first in their families to earn a college degree. In fact, most of our colleges and universities have not amassed the data necessary to determine the numbers or identities of their students who are firstgeneration (Padron 1992; London 1996), or they have not used or reported the data. What little is known about first-generation college students includes the fact that they are disproportionately represented in community colleges (Birenbaum 1986; Rendon 1994; Richardson and Skinner 1992; Willett 1989). The stigma that is generally attached to community colleges, to their...