It’s only a few weeks into fall quarter, but already Stanford freshman Ly Chheng has settled comfortably into California mode. “Orientation was great!” the former high school wrestler says, kicking back in his Lagunita dorm lounge during a midterm study break. He raves about his professors, particularly in his psych class, and life in Granada Room 219 is sweeter than he could have imagined, he says. “I’m mellowing,” the Maryland teenager adds playfully, pointing to the black rubber sandals on his feet.
Chheng’s casual confidence shouldn’t be surprising—he arrived on the Farm toting hefty academic credentials, including several Advanced Placement credits, stellar grades and nearly perfect SAT scores. What surprises some people is that he ever embarked on the road to Stanford in the first place. Chheng is the son of Southeast Asian refugees—his Cambodian-born father works long hours at a steel-shaping plant near their home in Greenbelt, Md.; his Thai mother works in the stock room at a department store. In admissions parlance, Chheng is a “first-generation” student, so called because his parents did not attend college.
Historically, that label has carried with it certain stereotypes: underprivileged and unsophisticated, talented and eager. Like most labels, the reality is more complicated. Some, like Chheng, have indeed lacked advantages that other students enjoyed, including financial help, admissions savvy and academic role models. Others come from wealthier, worldly backgrounds in which their first-generation status is mostly a footnote. Still, many of their stories brim with examples of overcoming the odds, of arduous journeys that include feelings of inadequacy, isolation and estrangement—and, in the end, triumph.
First-generation students account for about a third of enrollment at four-year colleges and universities nationwide, a number that has grown in recent years with rising immigration and increased financial aid opportunities. On the Farm, the proportion of first-generation students is much smaller, but still significant. Although Stanford does not keep a precise tally—historically the data has been shredded along with portions of applicants’ files—the annual freshman survey conducted by UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute asks incoming students about their parents’ education levels. Last year, about a fifth of Stanford’s 1,641 freshmen said they came from homes in which at least one parent did not earn a college degree.
What distinguishes many first-generation students, says Stanford education professor John Baugh, is their self-reliance and commitment. Baugh, who deals with many such students as faculty adviser to the Black Community Services Center, says they are often the archetypal bootstrap kids, “the people whom the high school counselor didn’t tell about the AP class, and they found out about it on their own. Nobody at home told them that they had to take the SAT or that they needed to fulfill a foreign language requirement, so they were digging out this information. From time to time first-generation students will tell me that there was a teacher or counselor who brought information to their attention. But I would say that for every one who says that, there are probably two or three who were actively discouraged.”
It isn’t just that their paths to Stanford required extra effort—their first challenge was finding the path itself.
Edgar Garcia, ’03, grew up poor in the bilingual border town of McAllen, Texas. He recalls, somewhat abashed, his unusual introduction to Stanford. “This sounds like a cheesy story,” he says, laughing, “but there was this after-school TV series called Saved By the Bell. It was about a bunch of high school kids, and in one episode there was a character named Jessie who was really unhappy about her test scores. She was saying, ‘Oh, I’m never going to get into Stanford or Yale!’ I figured those must be really good schools, so I started asking my counselor, ‘Where’s Stanford? Where’s Yale?’ ”
Garcia’s mother and father, Mexican-born immigrants who never finished elementary school, did all they could to support their son, but were stunned to learn that Stanford’s tuition was more than $28,000 per year. Garcia researched and applied for every scholarship he could find, and eventually was offered more scholarship money than any student in his school district’s history.
His transition to college life was equally shocking. “My high school was predominantly Hispanic, and here I was seeing people from Japan and China and India and Italy. I was exposed to so many different cultures, traditions, values and beliefs that I had never been exposed to before,” Garcia says. He had finished at the top of his class at Nikki Rowe High School, but when he turned in his first freshman writing assignment at Stanford—a paper he thought was one of his best ever—it came back with a C-minus. “I was scared,” he admits. “I worried that I might have to fly back to south Texas; I thought, ‘Maybe I’m not cut out for Stanford.’ ” Then he did the same thing he had done in high school when faced with obstacles—he went and found help. After a few sessions with teaching assistants and writing tutors, Garcia earned an A-minus on his next paper. He went on to shine at Stanford, singing with the Chamber Chorale and qualifying for a Gates Millennium Scholarship and graduate admission to the School of Education.
Throughout that difficult first year, Garcia says, his parents’ moral support was crucial. They may not have known much about college or the world outside of Texas, but they knew their son. “There’s a saying in Spanish, Sí se puede, or ‘Yes you can.’ Every time I would call home, that’s what they’d say: ‘Sí se puede. Sí se puede.’ Give it some more time and see what happens.’ ”
Terri Mosqueda, ’03, is a first-generation student from Long Beach, Calif. As a child, she suffered from asthma and frequently served as a translator between her physicians and her Spanish-speaking mother. At age 7, she was admitted to a magnet program for gifted students, where peers and counselors told her about Stanford. Her parents were very supportive, even if they didn’t always anticipate the hoops she had to jump through for admission. “I remember rushing my dad over to LAX a couple of times to the 24-hour post office so that we would meet the application deadlines,” Mosqueda recalls. Another time, with a scholarship application due, her father carried the envelope to downtown Long Beach, only to find the main post office closed and the mail truck driving away. “My dad actually got out of his car and chased the guy down the street,” she says, laughing at the memory. “Fortunately, I won the scholarship.”
Like Garcia, Mosqueda found life on the Farm tough going at first. The low point came just a few weeks into her freshman year, when she wound up in the Stanford Hospital emergency room after not taking her asthma medication properly. “I was stressed,” she now says of the incident. “Freshman year was tough because it was the first time I had been away from home. Other Stanford students just seemed fiercely independent, whereas I was calling home every day.” Then she met Luis Fraga, an associate professor in Stanford’s department of political science, and everything suddenly fell into place. “Once I met him, I knew the path I wanted to take,” says Mosqueda, who’s now completing a yearlong fellowship with the state legislature in Sacramento, and thinking about law school. “He has a very deep sense of respect for students and their intelligence. I don’t know what I would have done without him and my friends at El Centro [Chicano].”
Fraga has taken many first-generation students under his wing. As a first-generation student himself at Harvard in the early 1970s, he found it hard to connect with professors who seldom cared about what he wanted to study. “I was interested in issues of race and ethnicity in the Southwestern United States,” the Texas native explains, “and there were no faculty members at Harvard who had any interest or expertise in that area.” The same thing sometimes happens to first-generation students on the Farm. One of Fraga’s former Stanford advisees grew up in a polluted urban port city in Southern California. “She wanted to understand her hometown and the environmental issues it was confronting,” says Fraga, but such nontraditional subjects “often are not part of current faculty-driven research and teaching agendas.”
Fraga has noticed that first-generation undergraduates at Stanford tend to be more career-oriented than peers who come from highly educated families. Even though they may lack professional career models at home, many are eager to explore graduate school and internship opportunities, and they are much less likely to take time off after receiving their bachelor’s degrees. “They’re highly motivated,” Fraga observes.
Garcia’s and Mosqueda’s stories illustrate what several national studies have suggested—that first-generation students have a harder time making the transition to college than children of college graduates. Many also score lower on measures of self-image. As Bob Mattox, president of the American College Counseling Association, noted in a recent Counseling Today article, “Many of these students get into college and do very well in spite of certain disadvantages, yet for some reason, they believe that they shouldn’t be doing that well, that they are somehow not earning the kudos they receive.”
First-generation students also tend to fret more about their family ties. Some feel guilty about leaving to enjoy the good life at college while their parents and siblings stay home, or find it difficult to move back and forth between two radically different environments. Northwest Missouri State University President Dean Hubbard, who received his doctorate from Stanford’s School of Education in 1979, grew up on the edge of wheat fields near the Hanford Atomic Plant in Washington. “College was such a radical departure for me,” he says. “We had an outhouse until I was 9. I’d never tied a necktie, been to a restaurant or polished a pair of shoes. My father said college was a waste of time—that it would make a damned liberal out of me.” Hubbard went off to college anyway, and when he’d go home to visit, “it was a like a different world,” he recalls. “Every time I’d come home and see my friends, the social distance was greater. It was like going to visit a museum. They were locked in time.”
Chheng, the freshman from Maryland, acknowledges that his parents haven’t always been able to appreciate his academic achievements. After he learned his SAT score, he recalls, “I was jumping all over and calling friends. Then I ran into my living room, still jumping, and I shouted at my parents, ‘I got a 1520!’ I will never forget their faces. They looked back at me with the most serene expressions. It meant nothing to them. That’s when it came back to me that they never took the SATs; they didn’t know what the 99th percentile meant.”
This phenomenon is familiar to Camille Esch, an educational researcher who wrote her Stanford master’s thesis about four first-generation students. “For all of them, getting into Stanford took a lot of independence and self-motivation,” says Esch, who now works for SRI’s Center for Education Policy Studies. Nevertheless, many confided mixed feelings about their success. “Some of them felt a little guilty about getting a fantastic opportunity that some of their other family members couldn’t have, and they worried about how they were perceived by their family. They also tended to worry about the future: ‘My path is so divergent from my parents and my siblings, how is the rest of my life going to go? Once I leave Stanford and enter this other stratum of society, how are we going to relate to each other?’ ”
Esch, ’97, MA ’98, says she experienced a similar disconnect when she arrived at the Farm. She grew up in a small agricultural community in north San Diego County, and although her father did attend a small religious college, she was among the very few from her high school to continue her education, let alone at an elite school like Stanford.
“For me, going to Stanford was like Dorothy landing in Oz,” she recalls. “Academically, I felt challenged for the first time. Socially, I was thriving.” As the months passed and she grew more comfortable with her new environment, she began to worry about what she was leaving behind. “I’ve always been quite close to my parents, and suddenly my whole life was about being in college. I felt that I couldn’t talk to them about what I was studying and what I was thinking, because they didn’t have the foundation of knowledge to discuss it. I worried that after college I would be in a totally different social class, having different friends and more money than my parents, and that it would threaten our close relationship.”
Esch’s father, Dwight, who recently retired after many years with the California Department of Rehabilitation, acknowledges that it was hard for the family—and particularly hard for his wife—to send their bright daughter hundreds of miles away. “A lot of her family could not understand why she was going to school so far away when she could go somewhere else here at home,” he recalls. “They couldn’t believe that we did not speak to our daughter by phone every day. But I told Camille, ‘If you’re good enough to get into Stanford, we’ll work hard to help you get through.’ Which we did.” He laughs. “We’re still paying off some of those bills.”
Despite the adjustment challenges, none of the first-generation students Esch studied said they regretted coming to the Farm. Indeed, many were encouraging their siblings to work hard in school, too, so they might have a shot at admission. “As much as these students sometimes felt that their families didn’t understand—or in some cases didn’t even approve of—their decision to come to Stanford, they also ultimately recognized that their parents were very proud of them and excited about their accomplishments,” she says. Their attitude seemed to be “My success is a success for my whole family,” Esch adds.
That’s certainly the case with Garcia. “Leaving home was difficult,” he says. “I’d talk to my mom on the phone and she’d be crying. Even now, when I go home, my vocabulary changes. I switch to Spanish; it’s two different worlds completely.” But none of that mattered last June when Garcia, with his parents in the audience, received his bachelor’s degree in Stanford Stadium. It was the first time his mother and father had seen the campus, the first time they had flown on an airplane. “Back when I first was admitted,” he recalls, “my parents said ‘Stanford? Where’s Stanford? Is it in Texas?’ But now at work they’re always talking about me: ‘Edgar did this and Edgar did that.’ I am a very, very lucky guy.”
Theresa Johnston, ’83, is a Palo Alto freelance writer and frequent contributor to Stanford.
