My
last few posts have dealt with issues of vocational education, apprenticeships,
and college attendance. In this post, I want to continue this discussion by
offering an example of a person who is benefitting in some unexpected ways from
going to college.
I
have been mentoring a woman named Joanie who in her late-thirties entered a
local community college. She had been working for years as a home health care
aide, and was very good at it, but wanted to find employment that would be more
secure, less physically taxing, and paid a better salary. As she progressed
through community college, the goal of social work solidified, and she is now
close to transferring to a state university to pursue a B.A. in social work.
Joanie’s reasons for entering community college were overwhelmingly economic.
If at the outset there were a non-degree training pathway toward solid
employment that would have fit her interests, she would have taken it. And I
would have recommended it.
Joanie’s
two years at the community college have yielded an increase in her reading and
writing skills, in her analytic ability, and in her general knowledge of some areas
in the sciences and social sciences. These are expected – but still welcome –
outcomes of a general education curriculum. This mix of skills and general
knowledge prepares her for further, more specialized and demanding coursework
as she transfers to a four-year institution. There’s been an economic tradeoff,
of course, in that she has not been working full time as a home health aide
while she’s been in school, surviving off financial aid, campus jobs, and an
occasional health care gig. But the long-term economic benefit for her studies
is predicted to make up for temporary salary losses, so in terms of economics
alone, attending college has been a rational move.
What
is interesting in terms of the debate about college attendance is what else has
been happening to Joanie.
Always
a reader, she has developed into an avid consumer of print, reading when she
first gets up in the morning, looking for “a good book” to read after the
pressure of a big test has passed, consuming political news and commentary on
the Internet. She has begun writing in a journal and, on her own, does things
like examine the way an author opens a piece of writing in order to imitate the
author’s technique. Over the past year, she has been travelling the streets of
Downtown Los Angeles and East L.A. taking pictures of Mexican murals and stone
work, envisioning a magazine she’d like to create that would feature Mexican
and Mexican-American art and culture. And, finally, she is electing a
silk-screening class on Saturday mornings, getting a great deal of satisfaction
from the craft of it and imagining putting some of her photographs of masonry
on t-shirts. Whether or not the impulses to do these kinds of literary and
artistic projects have always been present in Joanie, I can’t say, but it’s
clear from what she tells me that the energy and skills for doing the projects
are related to her classes, and the relationships she’s developed with some of
her professors, and just the expansive possibility she feels through her
achievement in college.
I
talk to Joanie about once a week, and every time she in some way comments on
what college means to her, her changes in self-perception and self-respect, and
the sense of direction she has about her life. It wasn’t always that way. It
took quite a bit of cajoling and hand-holding to get her to attend her first class,
a non-credit Saturday offering for new students. She didn’t like it. But she
stuck it out, then enrolled as a regular student, still unsure, still
ill-at-ease. But gradually Joanie found her way, relying on the tutoring
center, and on programs for students like her, and on some sympathetic
teachers. “At first,” she says, “it was torture, and now it’s like family.”
One
more thing. Before entering college, Joanie had a cynically comic take on the
world, a view born of hardship and gutsiness. What I’ve noticed over the last
year is an embellishment of this comic sensibility. Her reading, her browsing
of the Internet, her literary experimentations are making their way into her
barbs and commentaries, for example, assuming an English herald’s voice (“Hear
ye, hear ye…”) to introduce an imagined encounter in one of her classrooms.
One’s humor is quite a personal thing, so it’s telling, I think, that Joanie’s
education is affecting it, is going that deep into her life.
In
some ways, Joanie is exceptional, and I don’t want to make broad claims based
on her case about the need for everyone to pursue a two- or four-year degree.
As I argue in my last post, a number of factors are involved in both individual
decisions and public policy initiatives regarding college attendance. But
Joanie’s case does illustrate several things worth keeping in mind. One is that
for some students the college experience can provide a range of benefits that
would not be available in a job training or apprenticeship program alone. The
second thing to note is that we might not be able to predict in advance—though we
might have some indications—as to who would benefit from the courses and
activities a college provides. At the outset, I would not have predicted Joanie’s
full-hearted embrace of the college experience. A third thing is that the
non-strictly-economic advantages of the college curriculum are potentially
available to people across the socioeconomic spectrum and across the types of
post-secondary institutions. Too often discussions about, for example, the
benefits of the liberal arts are focused primarily on advantaged students in
elite colleges.
Finally, let’s
return to Joanie’s primary motive for attending college: to improve her
economic prospects. It is important to acknowledge this fact, but also to
notice all the other interests and motives that have emerged within the push to create a better
economic future through college. We tend to be reductive and dichotomous in our
discussions of the reasons why people want to (or should) go to college. For most
of us, major life undertakings result from a web of motives and circumstances,
and what drives and sustains us in that undertaking can change, sometimes
profoundly, along the way. The same holds for people like Joanie as she tries
to better her lot in life by going to college.
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