Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don't

How do working-class students end up at working-class colleges and universities? An inside account of the California state system unearths the class structure of higher education

By Renny Christopher

Elite universities continue to turn out the future upper-middle class, while regional universities, whose students are commonly the first in their families to attend college, educate the degreed working class. Both types of institutions disserve working-class students: in elite colleges and universities, such students face class prejudice and discrimination; in regional institutions, they receive an inferior education, which ensures that they will remain in lower-level jobs. These two forms of oppression—classism in elite universities and undereducation in regional institutions—work together to preserve the existing class structure, even while allowing a few individuals, like me, to work their way "upward" at the price of deculturation.

Yet many people continue to believe in the fairness of education and the equality of opportunity. Humanities scholar Benjamin DeMott writes in his 1990 book, The Imperial Middle: Why Americans Can't Think Straight About Class:

[W]hat matters . . . is the exceptional breadth of agreement on fairness and evenhandedness as school norms. Certainty that career prospects are related to school performance cuts across social classes from old money to new money through the poverty line; so, too, does trust in the impartially grading teacher, and assurance of the weight of personal choice. . . . [T]he educational process overall is seen as both clean and potent, capable of creating a degree of equality through its own impartiality, capable also of guaranteeing all children—regardless of their parents' success or failure in life—some chance of self-propelled upward movement.

DeMott refers to K-12 education, but since World War II the perception he describes has spread to higher education, especially in terms of what he calls "belief in school the equalizer." I used to ask my students at the California State University campus where I taught, which is about a two-hour drive from Stanford University, who would have the more prestigious degree and therefore more opportunities, them or a Stanford graduate. Their response was usually knowing laughter; Stanford, after all, is the West Coast Ivy League. What they don't know is that there's just as sharp a line between Cal State and the University of California, and that it's not just a difference of prestige, but also of intellectual skills learned.

In his utopian and hopeful article, "Returning to Class: Creating Opportunities for Multicultural Reform at Majority Second-Tier Schools," published in 2001 in College English, English professor John Alberti explores the possibility of multicultural transformations in such institutions. He makes a lovely understatement when he writes that "the term 'first-generation' itself potentially obscures the class implications of being such a student in order to minimize the potentially radical significance of these differences, differences that signify a level of conflict and change beyond the capacity of most traditional institutional structures to handle."

Forced Adjustment

I emerged from my own experiences as a first-generation student at, first, an elite liberal-arts college where I received a B.A. and, then, an elite university where I received a Ph.D., effectively educated yet shell-shocked. In between, I did an M.A. at a state school. For a long time (until I ended up a professor at a state school), I thought my experience there, where the intense pressure of classism did not oppress me, but where little high-wire education was going on, was an anomaly. But that "anomaly" was actually the norm.

Note that I said I was "effectively educated" in elite schools, not "well educated." I chose my terms carefully, because part of my education included learning contempt for my family and the culture I came from, eradicating the dialect I grew up speaking, and learning values of hierarchy, ambition, individualism, and intellectual snobbery—what many would call "pride in intellectual achievement." I now characterize the years I spent working to unlearn my precollege self as my miseducation. But this miseducation came interlaced with useful skills-skills of rhetoric, of analysis—that my own students at the state university are not gaining.

So my question is, Is it possible to get the high-level skills without the classism that permeates elite institutions? In his essay in the 1995 volume, This Fine Place So Far From Home, Irvin Peckham, director of first-year writing at Louisiana State University, comments that although "the educational institution professes to promote egalitarianism, to offer equal chances to all, it is implicated in a social structure that marginalizes difference." Is there a way for the universities and colleges to lead the way to social reform that would eliminate classism?1

Alberti identifies as a class division the "gap between first-tier, selective-admissions schools and second-tier, open-registration, regional two- and four-year colleges." He counts 24 percent of U.S. institutions as "elite" and 66 percent as "regional"; the elite campuses having (in 1994) 4,299,000 students and the regional campuses 10,950,000 students. He notes that, historically, elite universities have created "what we now think of as the professional managerial class," while the focus of the regional schools has been "mass education" to turn out "academically skilled" employees that would be managed by the graduates of the more prestigious schools, a "paper-working class."

The state of California exemplifies this division, with its four venues of higher education: private colleges and universities, of which there are 39, and the University of California, the California State University, and the California Community College systems. The University of California system has 9 campuses that enrolled 177,108 full-time-equivalent students in 2000-01; it is mandated to accept the top 12 percent of high school graduates. The California State University system has 23 campuses and had 300,000 students in 2000-01; it is mandated to take the next third of high school graduates. The California Community College system has 109 campuses and enrolled 1,507,000 students in 2000-01; it has open admissions.2 These systems are ranked hierarchically, both explicitly and covertly.

I have been a student or an instructor in all four institutional categories and have observed as a result of these experiences that: (a) working-class students at elite institutions face classism, but if they survive the brutalization as I (almost) did, they are primed for high levels of "success," and (b) whereas students at regional schools face much less discrimination, they receive less prestigious degrees, less exposure to the old boy-old girl network, and an education that provides them with fewer skills and discourages them from the sort of intellectual autonomy that has led me to sit comfortably in my tenured position and blithely declare that the whole educational system is functionally dysfunctional. In this article, I will describe the class structure, in hard numbers, of the two-tiered higher education system in California and then briefly explore the problem of classism and education within the two tiers.

California's Class Divide

For the same academic year, the California State University system received $2.7 billion from the state (approximately $9,000 for each student). The CSU system budgeted for a student-faculty ratio of 21 to 1, and the average teaching load was 8 courses for the year. The California Community College system received $2.9 billion (approximately $1,920 for each student), and the annual teaching load was ten courses.

State support alone, however, paints a misleading picture of the real command of resources. According to a 2000 University of California press release, the total budget of the UC system, with funds from all sources, including federal support for three national laboratories, was actually $15.7 billion for the 1999-2000 academic year. The "performance indicators" published by the California Postsecondary Education Commission in 2000 reported that the average revenues devoted to instructionally related activities for each full-time-equivalent student for each of the four systems in 1998-99 were as follows: independent colleges and universities, $23,086; UC system, $15,173; CSU system, $10,078; CCC system, $4,322.

In the CSU system, about 20 percent of students were first-generation college-goers in 1999-2000, according to a 2000 press release from the CSU chancellor's office.3 My former campus, CSU Stanislaus, is wildly anomalous, because 84 percent of its students are first generation.4 In 1993-94, according to the Student Needs and Priorities Survey published in 1994 by the CSU system, the median family income for dependent CSU students (42 percent were dependent) was $48,000, while 82 percent of independent students earned less than $18,000 a year.

Data about the number of first-generation students in the UC system are harder to analyze. In 1998-99, 58.6 percent of the fathers of entering students had college degrees; 48.6 percent of students' mothers did; there is no way to merge the two numbers, but it is safe to say that at least 59 percent, if not more, of entering UC students were not first generation.5 The figures for UC and CSU are not, however, commensurate, since the UC figure counts only four-year degrees, while the CSU figure measures "some college." In Who Our Students Are: 1999-2000, CSU Fullerton reports that its student population was 26 percent first generation by the CSU definition, that is, 74 percent of its students had parents with "some college." But its student population was 51 percent first generation by the UC definition, that is, only 49 percent of its students were children of a four-year college graduate.6 My analysis of the state's 2001-02 budget bill found that the annual median family income for nonresident UC undergraduates was about $90,000 in 1999; the median family income for resident UC undergraduates was $60,000.

The Cal State University system is acutely aware of the presence of working-class students on its campuses, and it takes pride in its educational mission. Like the UC system, however, it often presents the face of elitism. A 2002-03 brochure the CSU Human Resources and Public Affairs Offices published for new CSU faculty contains a section titled "Who Are Our Students?" The final sentence of this section reads: "Indeed, because of the presidential scholars programs now active on every campus, the very best students in California—Merit Scholars and valedictorians—are finding their home in the CSU, which is also known for its welcome of countless first-generation college-goers." The contrast of first-generation students with "Merit Scholars and valedictorians" reveals the university's attitude toward first-generation students—they're not Merit Scholars or valedictorians. Such dismissive, classist attitudes insult working-class students and faculty of working-class origin.

CSU is the "people's university," but the "people" get far fewer resources than the elites do, which isn't surprising, since CSU educates at least twice as many truly working-class, first-generation students as does the University of California. And what's the content of the education provided by the two different systems? I address this issue at length in an article I wrote for a volume titled Teaching Working Class, and will just allude to it here.

Literature and Life

a. The greatest value of this course is that it breaks down the separation between the world of labor and that of academia. It brings the reality of working class life into the classroom. For once, we spent a lot of time looking at real issues, rather than discussing more or less irrelevant critical/theoretical concepts.

b. I particularly enjoyed our discussions connecting the ideas and experiences in the books with the world around us. . . . I learned a lot as a literature student, but, more than that, I learned a lot as a human being (cheesy as that sounds).

What emerges, for me, from these representative comments is the emphasis students put on the holism of the experience. A course that insisted on connections between literature and the lives of actual persons gave them a way to put together their studies and the world, and provided a forum that reversed the usual practice in elite universities of marginalizing or denigrating the life experiences of working-class students.

The following year, at Cal State Stanislaus, in an environment free of class prejudice, I was shocked by how clearly my Cal State students were victims of a bad education. I taught an M.A.-level course on U.S. working-class literature in which we followed the same style of discussion as in the UCSC undergraduate senior seminar. But the discussions remained, for me, flat, and I constantly caught myself thinking the students were "unsophisticated" or "uninspired." Every time I found myself thinking in terms like that, I went through a roller-coaster identity crisis. Weren't these the students I wanted to reach? Wasn't I reaching them? How could I think of them as my own instructors must have thought of me? The course evaluations suggested that I did reach them. A typical comment was, "This course has been the embodiment of what a college class ought to be. I not only learned about the material which was covered in class; I learned something about myself and the society in which we find ourselves. Students were encouraged to bring their ideas to the table and hash them out."

It is significant that this student conceptualizes the course as consisting of "material" to be covered. He or she sees learning as mastering a "body of material." This notion of higher education is impoverished. It undervalues the role of the learner, and discourages active engagement and participation in forming one's own intellectual universe. These students have not learned to be autonomous thinkers, imbued with a sense of their intellectual worth. Paradoxically, the working-class students at UCSC seemed, despite their feelings of oppression, to have gained a sense of themselves as thinkers that the Cal State students had not.

The relatively less rigorous education provided to CSU students has a far-ranging impact, beyond its influence on the lives of the students themselves. Referring to one study of K-12 education, Lois Weiner and her colleagues noted in a 2001 issue of the journal Educational Policy: "The difference between teacher preparation in the nation's major research universities and former normal schools and state teachers' colleges remains a critical but rarely acknowledged factor in reform." Thus a cycle is created and maintained.

What, then, can we do? Those of us who teach and administer at elite universities can get clued to class, start keeping class-based statistics, and stop devaluing our working-class students. The field of working-class studies, through books like Teaching Working Class and other texts, is advancing that goal. Those of us who teach at regional universities can work to break our students out of the rigid, authoritarian model of education they're led into. Doing that means we must often fight our most senior colleagues and administrators. Let's have at them. John Alberti suggests that we in the profession should look at what he calls the "majority second-tier schools" as the norm of college education, and not look at the elite schools as the norm. Let's do that, too. And mostly, let's talk about class, all the time, no matter where we are. Let's expose the secrets of resources that underlie prestige. Let's talk to our own families, communities, and politicians about distribution of resources. Let's encourage our students to do the same.

Notes

2. The CSU system is the largest four-year university system in the United States. It has more than 21,000 faculty members and 370,000 (headcount) students. Nearly 2 million people hold CSU B.A.'s. The system confers half of the B.A.'s and a third of the M.A.'s awarded in California. Back to text

3. In addition, 40 percent came from households in which English was not the primary language, and more than 30 percent identified themselves as biracial. A 1994 Student Needs and Priorities Survey (SNAPS) published by the CSU system reported that among the 20 percent who were first-generation students, 17 percent had fathers who had not graduated from high school, and 16 percent had mothers who had not done so. In addition, 71 percent of CSU students worked while in school in 1994; of those, 25 percent worked thirty-five or more hours a week. In 1991-92, according to SNAPS, 83 percent of CSU students were commuters, while in the UC system, 11 percent were. Twenty percent of CSU students were twenty-five or older, while only 8 percent of UC students were. Fifty-three percent of CSU students were dependent on their parents; 82 percent of UC students were. Seventy-three percent of CSU students worked in 1991-92; 58 percent of UC students did. Thirty-three percent of CSU students worked thirty hours or more; 12 percent of UC students did. Back to text

4. This figure is an average that the university frequently quotes. For the entering first-year class of 1999-2000, 15.5 percent of students had parents who were four-year college graduates; among transfer students, 15.2 percent did. The UC system also has one anomalous campus, Riverside, at which 74 percent of students are first-generation college-goers; it is known derogatorily within the system as the "working-class campus." Back to text

5. Performance Indicators of California Higher Education, 2000, published by the California Postsecondary Education Commission, reports every imaginable piece of demographic information regarding race, gender, and even income, but it does not record statistics on first-generation students. UC Santa Cruz, my alma mater, was able to tell me, unofficially, that 11.3 percent of the entering class of 2000-01 were first-generation college students. Back to text

6. CSU Fullerton also breaks down the statistics further, noting that only 4 percent of African American students were first generation in 1999-2000; 52 percent of Latino students were, 29 percent of Asian Americans were, and 13 percent of whites were. Half of the total percentage (26) of first-generation college students were also first-generation high school graduates; 3 percent of whites were first-generation high school graduates, and 37 percent of Latinos were. Back to text

Renny Christopher is associate professor of English at California State University, Channel Islands.

 Printer-Friendly Page