Working-Class Collegians: The True Believers

While thousands of U.S. collegians are busily rejecting the values of their affluent parents, hardly anyone recalls that quaint figure, the poor youth struggling to become his family's first college graduate. In fact, he is still very much around. If his voice is rarely heard, it is because he still believes in the old U.S. idea that education is salvation --a notion that consumes his energy and compels him to work, work, work.

The increased availability of scholarships, student loans and work-study programs has drawn more children of working-class families to college than ever before. While they predominate at "commuter colleges" like Wayne State in Detroit and the new Federal City College in Washington, they also attend the better-known universities. Indeed, one study indicates that 58% of U.S. freshmen last year had fathers who did not go to college. At last count, 37% of all college students came from families headed by blue-collar, service or farm workers.

Underwear for Christmas. Many of these students are considerably older than their classmates and must drive themselves to stay in school. Eric J. Priestley, 25, a psychology major at California State College at Los Angeles, works up to 15 hours a week as a consultant to tutors in the school's Educational Opportunities Program, for which he earns $120 a month. He sometimes must borrow bus fare from his professors for the ride back to his home in predominantly Negro Compton, where he often stays up until 4 a.m. to write a novel, poetry and plays expressing the frustrations of a ghetto black. He claims that he can get along on 15 hours of sleep a week. John Gonzales, a journalism major at San Francisco State College, finds that he cannot hold a job during the school year and keep up his studies. But he works 60 hours a week during the summer, lives on the pay he saves in the winter and gets state-guaranteed student loans when the cash runs out. Mostly he works in lumber mills, like his Mexican immigrant father; his mother frequently sends him vegetables that she cans in their Stockton home, and his grandmother sometimes encloses a $1 bill in a letter.

White working-class students usually have less trouble, but even for them life can be a grind. Marilyn Masiero, 25, who will receive her education degree from New York University in January, has taken several bank loans, worked summers, weekends and Christmas vacations, is now an apprentice teacher in a Harlem public school. "You die of anxiety every year until that scholarship letter comes," she says. "If you go out on a date, you borrow the clothes. You have a pair of shoes and a pair of sandals, and you wear the sandals till November. For Christmas gifts you ask for money and underwear."

Their struggles set these students apart from middle-class student radicals, and they know it. A few, as might be expected, express contempt for college revolutionaries. Olga Mike, 20, who has worked as a domestic and a receptionist while attending N.Y.U., speaks bitterly of "Kids with nothing to do--they don't even go to classes, but they take over a building and sit in it drinking wine." Most of the working-class students share the radicals' opposition to the Viet Nam war and the draft. Many even grant that campus rebels have done some good by awakening society to evils that must be corrected. Even so, their predominant feeling to ward the radicals is simple dissociation. "I haven't taken part in any demonstrations," says Sally De Haven, 22, a scholarship student at the Chicago Circle campus of the University of Illinois, who works two nights and one weekend day in a hippie store. "I'm really too busy studying and working."

The working-class students differ most sharply from the revolutionaries in their attitudes toward their parents and the education they are getting. Far from feeling alienated, they speak of their fathers and mothers with deep affection. Eric Priestley is constantly pained by the thought that his 65-year-old mother, who has a bad heart, still does housework for other people and that his father, 63, who has hardening of the arteries as well as a bad heart, must still mow lawns to keep a rented roof over their heads. Patricia Cabbell, 25, who clerks at Federal City College for 18 hours a week while studying nursing, is determined to earn the pride of her father, a Baptist minister who did not go to college. "I'm his hope," she says.

The Key. Overwhelmingly, the working-class students feel that the radicals do not appreciate the value of a modern university education. To them, it is the all-important thing, and the one form of campus protest they cannot abide is disruption of classes. Yet unlike earlier generations of poor students, and like the middle-class revolutionaries, they tend to define success in terms of making a contribution to society rather than making money. "I think the most important thing I can do with my life is to use my education to help chicano communities," says John Gonzales. He hopes to work for a big-city newspaper covering Mexican-American communities. "I know both sides, so I can write as a liaison between the chicano and the white neighborhoods," he says. Education is "the key" to improving society, says Olga Mike, who dreams of becoming an opera singer, but will work first as a teacher. She adds: "I'm not against marchers, but my way is to get through school as fast as I can and learn as much as I can. I say, wait and bide your time. Then, when your time comes, do whatever you can."

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