A College Education: It Only Took Three Generations of Women
ChrisTina Leimer
Director, Institutional
Research, Assessment and Planning
Why? Why not? How do you know? Who said so? Why can’t I? Asking questions is so central to who I am that going to college should have been taken for granted. After all, where else can someone who constantly questions the world, thrive?
"My father wanted me to quit high school and go to work in a factory. We didn’t need the money, but it would be good for me. It would require the discipline he thought I lacked. For me, this plan was death."
To my teachers, it was a given that I would go to college. But to my family, college was a foreign concept. Having a kid who questioned everything just meant that she needed discipline. That meant she needed to work.
What I knew about college, until I got into high school, was what I heard from my father. He had only an eighth grade education, but had a distant cousin with a college degree. “College makes you crazy,” my dad said, citing Edward, a chemist who’d been in a mental hospital twice “because he was too smart.” Or, “it takes away your common sense,” he said, citing the example of a college-educated cousin of my mother. In the 1960’s, this “city boy” believed he could “live in the woods off of nuts and berries,” as my father derisively described Ben’s communal, environmentally-aware lifestyle. Instead of a deterrent, as my dad intended, these guys attracted me. Never having met them, they were shadowy figures alerting me to the reality that there were ways to live other than the routines of my small, blue-collar town.
Unlike my dad, my mom loved to read. When I was six, at night, after everyone except the two of us had gone to bed, she snuggled into a blanket next to the woodstove in the living room of our farmhouse, lamplight shining on the anatomy book in her lap, and studied for her cosmetology exam. She planned to open her own beauty shop. And she did. As a teenager, her dream was to go to art school. For a farm girl, that was unheard of and her father squashed such a wild notion. Instead, she got pregnant, dropped out of school in the tenth grade and married my 20-year-old, entrepreneurial father.
“Let her read whatever she wants,” my mom told the librarian before I launched into a temper tantrum at the check-out counter. I had wondered into the adult-level reading section of the public library and picked out a book. With the ability to read at this level in early elementary school, I got in trouble for trying to help the teacher with the “slow kids,” meaning everyone else in the class, and then I got in trouble when, not allowed to help them, I derided them in my frustration at their inability to quickly read a simple sentence aloud.
“She’s going to be a teacher,” the only educated adults in my world, who were teachers, said. But I bristled at that future. I’ll never be a teacher, I thought. But I did think, without knowing what college was at that age, that wherever you went to get the most education you could get, that’s where I’d go.
Biographies were my favorite reading. After a trip to the public library, I’d lay on the floor in front of the picture window overlooking our front yard and the interstate highway that ran from New Orleans to Chicago and read about Booker T. Washington, Amelia Earhart, Admiral Perry, and Chief Joseph. Here were people doing important, interesting, adventurous things. They were exploring the world, conquering it, inventing new machines, and helping others. They were living lives of my dreams, the lives no one in my world spoke of or imagined.
When I was thirteen, my taken-for-granted world ended. My mother left us. Preoccupied with her new love and the troubles that followed, she had no influence over my angry, betrayed father whose view of life suddenly predominated. Now, instead of jokingly berating, but tolerating, my love of books, he openly scorned it. One evening, when I lay in the recliner reading instead of washing the dishes, he walked in, knocked the book out of my hand, dragged me from the chair and forced me to the kitchen sink. “You think you’re so smart,” he said.
My father wanted me to quit high school and go to work in a factory. We didn’t need the money, but it would be good for me. It would require the discipline he thought I lacked. For me, this plan was death. So, I left home during my senior year, got my own apartment, worked the midnight shift in a nursing home and finished high school. I was considered for scholarships to college, including a full-ride to one of the best journalism schools in the nation, but I didn’t believe I could do it. And I couldn’t imagine living in a dorm room with “normal” eighteen-year-olds after living on my own. So, against my high school counselor’s advice, I withdrew my name from the scholarship pool.
A summer without school showed me I’d made a big mistake. The routine of sex, drugs, minimum wage and conversations that never ran deeper than television shows or so-and-so’s latest bust-up with her boyfriend was a future that rivaled factory life for its suicide potential. I had to go to college. So, I tried to enroll at the nearest university. Since Fall semester was about to start, all the scholarships were gone and I couldn’t apply for other financial aid until the following year.
While I waited, life happened. Car engines blew up. Tires needed replacing. My typewriter was stolen. Little things that, when you have money, are minor inconveniences, but when you don’t, can completely alter the course of your life. By the time my first semester started, I’d already borrowed money from anyone who’d give it to me and was in 21% interest credit card debt just to make ends meet. So, I knew I’d never finish a four-year degree in four years. Somehow I had to earn more money, and I wanted to do more challenging work. I believed, with just enough coursework to show me how to professionally develop manuscripts, I could sell my writing on a freelance basis or maybe even get a journalist job.
Registering for classes during my first semester, I argued with the faculty advisor to let me take journalism classes rather than more math and English. I explained my plan. She didn’t believe it but eventually we compromised on my course load. Five required courses and a journalism course. Over the next 11 years, I published my writing in magazines and worked as a newspaper reporter and editor along with numerous other types of jobs, always with the intent of finishing my degree but needing to eat. I attended three universities, enrolling each semester for as many credits as I could cram into my schedule. I never knew how many semesters I’d be able to attend before another knockout obstacle arose, so I wanted to make the most of each semester before I had to drop out and work multiple jobs to recover enough financially to enroll again. Twelve years after graduating from high school, I finished my bachelor’s degree.
Three years later, I received an assistantship to go to graduate school full-time. After earning my Master’s degree, my 75-year-old maternal grandmother, who had never commented about my going to college before, told me she was proud of me and that she realized what a struggle it had been, how hard I’d had to work to get an education. No one in my family ever acknowledged this. The knot growing in my throat restrained the tears, and left just enough of an air passage for me to say thank you, and ask, “Grandma, you were married at 14. Was there ever anything else you wished you could have done in your life?”
Nothing she might have said would have surprised me more than what she did say: “I wish I had been able to finish my education.”
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