A Poor Student in a Rich Girl’s World
I had a four-year National Merit Scholarship, Pell Grant, CalGrant, and other scholarships and ended up working full time to pay my college tuition.
I was in my second year at Scripps College when my suitemate asked if she could borrow a top that she’d seen me wear to a party.
“Of course,” I said. “Where are you going?”
“Oh,” she said, with a blithe toss of her blonde coif. “We’re going to Catalina on Daddy’s yacht.”
“Oh gosh,” I said. “How nice. Have fun!”
In two years, she never asked me what I was doing or where I was going. I was never invited to go on the yacht.
I’m sure that was my fault. Don’t you agree?
Qualified to Attend But Lacking the Cash-et
The New York Times has written about “economic diversity” at U.S. colleges and universities. Their report discovered that little had changed since the 1980s.
At selective colleges, there isn’t any.
At many public colleges and universities, the same is true. My father and brother were both UCLA Bruins. Yet even at UCLA, only 22% of first-year students are receiving Pell Grants, the federal direct college aid for lower-income students.
The Times emphasizes the “highly selective” colleges which are admitting more Pell Grant recipient students. What these numbers represent are a few hundred lower-income students slowly being admitted year-by-year. One out of five lower income students will still share my experience at the majority of these schools.
The Flower Blooms Only to Be Crushed
How did I come to receive such large scholarships to such an expensive private college?
I received a perfect score on the SAT, my grades were impeccable, and I had excellent work, extracurricular/sports/music/arts, and volunteer experience. Way back in 1979. Every school on the “highly selective” list solicited me to their campus and I visited a few. I selected Scripps for two reasons.
First, my mother had wanted to go there, but our family could not afford it. She attended the University of Redlands in our hometown (where she was the first female editor and publisher of the campus newspaper). Exactly 40 years later, I filled that same role at the Claremont Colleges.
Second, Scripps College offered the best financial package of any school. From what I was told when I started, I would have a full four-year college education paid for.
However, when I arrived on one of the most beautiful campuses in the nation, I was shy and withdrawn. I had the self-esteem of a snail and although I tried not to show it, I was afraid I’d be teased and ostracized if I did anything to draw attention to myself.
My suitemate never invited me to go on her Daddy’s yacht, but she and her friends did encourage me to participate in school governance.
I remember one evening when, crying, I said, “I can’t do that: nobody would vote for me.”
They all comforted and encouraged me, so I took a chance. I ran for College Council. I won.
I applied for the Humanities Internship. I received it and became “The Intern” at the Los Angeles Times Book Review. I started working for the five-College newspaper as the “art critic.” The next year, they opened interviews for Editor. I applied and received the job. Then I became the Publisher.
I was advancing rapidly, receiving good grades, partying all night long every night, and working hard at several part-time jobs.
By my Junior year, my scholarships had shrunk, including the Pell Grants. By my Senior year, I was paying $560 a month to the school, nearly every penny I earned that did not go to gas, car maintenance, and food.
And books. I didn’t share my book habit with my tony, high-income mansion-dwelling classmates — but I am what I am.
What had led to such a change? I’d entered college with everything completely paid for by scholarships and grants because I was an independent student.
It’s been called the “Reagan Revolution.”
The height of irony?
One of my part-time jobs was working at what was then called the Rose Political Institute. I made redistricting maps for them. I didn’t know what those maps meant. I just knew I was cutting out pieces of amberlith or rubylith and creating four-color separations of different maps based on a Thomas Guide.
My boyfriend and his friends were students at Claremont McKenna College. They were all politically-connected. They were all Conservative. They rode the “Reagan Train” and one day, one of them asked if I could make a poster using selected images of “Americana” and a great picture of President Reagan.
Here it is.
I also made the campaign materials for David Drier, a long-time Conservative member of Congress from the Claremont area.
Way back in 1982? I was making $25/hour. That was good money for a Studio Art & British-American Literature major.
I made the same amount modeling swimwear and slightly less in my job at the newspaper.
In 1983, I graduated and did not make that much working as a cub newspaper reporter, radio announcer, and car salesperson. Even though I did work at a Porsche dealership for a brief time. I made about $200/night being a DJ in different clubs.
I did not understand that while I’d entered college during a time when student jobs were paid for by the Job Training Partnership Act (JTPA), including even my internship at the Los Angeles Times (and a prior one at the San Bernardino County Museum) — the man I made the poster for — did not want those types of programs to continue. College aid was dropped and we students either had to work as hard as possible, as I did, or take out student loans.
Even with all this, I somehow managed to continue my double major (yes, I have two BAs), work nearly full-time, including weekends — so Yacht With Daddy was out — and continue my social life. I was nominated for a Rhodes Scholarship and a Watson Fellowship.
Even at that time, I had begun to see myself as a writer.
Then this happened.
So, while I was admitted to the UC Irvine and Iowa writers’ programs and also Claremont Graduate School for art — I didn’t attend.
I went home to my hometown of Redlands, California. In the interim, I attended the Clarion Science Fiction Writers Workshop at MSU (1984). But I couldn’t spent hours writing short fiction or even try to write a novel if I wanted to eat.
After working a bunch of part-time jobs for about 18 months, I became the Campaign Associate at the United Way.
Then I became Executive Director of Family Service Assn., which happened to be the first charitable organization registered in the state of California as well as my small town hometown’s mainstay charitable organization.
My daughter Meredith was born in 1992. My husband Mike found a copy of Larry Niven’s Tales of Known Space in an old box from his USAF days.
“You wanted to be a sci-fi writer,” he said.
“Well yeah,” I said. “Yes, I did.”
So I read my Larry Niven stories (again) and started writing. It wasn’t a scholarship process at an elite private college. It wasn’t Iowa or Irvine.
By 1996, I had made my first pro sci-fi sale (“Jonny Punkinhead”) and applied to the MFA Creative Writing program at Chapman University. It had taken a decade and a half for me to trust going into any college or university environment again.
I did eventually choose to teach at a community college. I related better to the students and my colleagues in that environment.
And the reason for that?
I never got invited to go on Daddy’s yacht.
But I was that good a student, that high an achiever, that strong, that fit, that well, that capable, that powerful —
And no one in charge at that school, not the callous enabling Dean of Students or even my back step “smoking buddy” college President John Chandler —
cared whether I lived or died.
This is a core problem in our society.
Privilege over and above all else. It will not change until those of us who are not privileged stop allowing the privileged to use their non-values to direct every aspect of our lives.
Young people are turning away from formal higher education for many reasons, and the privilege problem is chief among them.
Why spend four years and — even with scholarships — vast sums of money to learn very little and be in a hostile environment where you are not wanted, valued, and are not, never have been, and never will be accepted?
Wow. All those accomplishments and accolades and still treated like something on the bottom of your roommate's boating shoes. I can relate. Not that I ever did anything but go to class and read and make the Dean's List, but even at my bottom-tier nothing school, I didn't fit.
Reagan was also the genius behind taxing scholarships as income, so my parents had to pay taxes for my full scholarship.
I didn't have to work--and in retrospect maybe I shouldn't have, and focused on a science degree, instead of English where, aside from one notable exception, I was always treated as unwelcome--but I did. A party photographer for people like your rich friends, pickling their brains at their parties Friday and Saturday nights. $100 a night in 1990-92 was real money.
Interesting to see SMU on the NYT's list. SMU is notorious as a party school, so I'm surprised it's some kind of 'elite' school. You go there for alcoholism training, get your degree in marketing, and work for your parents. After I graduated and walked away from my first graduate school--I can relate to your low self esteem--I wrote papers for SMU students. Very nice cars, no lights on upstairs.