I was tabling on Sproul one day, with a girl I had just met. We had the typical conversation: where are you from? What’s your major? She was working on homework for a CSS class while we chatted. She seemed to get stuck at one point and take a break from it. I asked what the trouble was, although I didn’t have a single clue what I was seeing on her screen. She answered, “It’s no big deal. I’ll fix it. I’m just gonna call my dad, but I think it’s gonna be difficult.” I immediately thought she needed to call her dad about money or something she needed, and I thought I understood her reticence. “Oh, are your parents working-class? Is it hard to explain college stuff to them?” Of course, I was totally projecting my own experience. She was distracted as she pulled up Skype on her laptop. “No, my dad’s an engineer. I want to call him about this project. I just know he’s impatient with me because I’m not as naturally gifted as he is.” She dialed up her dad in India. He explained to her in a bored tone of voice how to solve the problem she was working on.

I was new at Berkeley, and I was really hoping to meet people who came from a life like I had come from. I remembered the statistics from CalSo about the percentage of students who received financial aid, and I thought I’d meet lots of people who had grown up poor. I thought about everyone who had stood when we were asked to stand if we were first generation college students. The girl I sat with on Sproul patiently explained to me that we had nothing in common. Her still-married parents were an engineer and a neurologist. They were financially comfortable enough to pay for her education, but disappointed that she was not a determined hard-science major as they had been. The trouble she had talking with her parents was a world away from my own.

My mom is very smart. She can read a stranger’s face perfectly and she makes business deals and handles money in a take-no-prisoners way that she’s always referred to as “Jesse James-ing.” She’s cunning and quick and very creative when she chooses to be. She did not, however, go to college. She dropped out of high school, like me. Unlike me, she immediately got pregnant and had three kids that she had to support and raise almost totally on her own. The path of her life has not yet led back to school. She is ultra-supportive of my siblings and me pursuing our educations. As I’ve grown up and learned and changed, she’s been my biggest fan. She understands the value of education, that’s not an issue.

The difference of growing up poor and raised by people who didn’t go to college is one that is hard to communicate. My friend on Sproul was told her whole life about college, both as a concept and as a reality. Her parents told stories about it, derived who they are from it, and probably expected it from her and her siblings without question. Growing up without those stories and that expectation is a disadvantage, no question. However, the almost insurmountable obstacle comes from not knowing the process. Parents who did not go to college don’t know when you should take the SAT, or how to fill out applications. They may or may not be willing or able to provide their kids with the information on income that they’ll need to apply for both admission and aid. They are far less likely to arrange campus field trips or even talk about where and how the process began. Counselors are overtaxed and underpaid in high schools all over the country. So we fly blind.

Shortly after I went back to school, I brought home a friend for dinner. My mom is the most generous and welcoming of hostesses, and she was no less so to my new friend. Over dinner, my friend and I got into a spirited discussion on what we thought was the best treatment of the Arthurian legend in literature: “Morte d’Arthur” or “Idylls of the King.” We went back and forth for a long time, shutting everyone else out of the conversation. When she could get a word in, my mom interjected: “I like Ziggy. Sometimes Calvin and Hobbes, but Ziggy is the best.”

I realized then that keeping my mom in the conversation was not just something I needed to do to be polite. I was moving to a foreign country called Academia, and that if I forgot how to speak the language we used at home, I’d lose her, too. Bridging the gap within my family between education levels isn’t easy. For people who come to Berkeley broke, sometimes the steepest learning curve is outside the classroom.

Meg Elison writes the Monday column on financial issues affecting UC Berkeley students.Contact Meg Elison at melison@dailycal.org.

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