This post first appeared in May, 2005.
This month, I’m writing two appeals letters on behalf of two students who were denied admission (inexplicably, in both cases) to UCLA. Both students are very bright young women, but one of the two presented me with a bit of a dilemma: my alma mater accepted her, while the so-called "Southern Branch" rejected her. I must admit that my Golden Bear pride was hurt. I know that admissions decisions can be capricious; a few years ago, I had one student get into Stanford while being rejected from UC Santa Barbara. But it stings a Cal alum to have UCLA appear to be more selective!
This young woman, whom I’ll call "Amy", would much rather attend UCLA than Cal. She’s appealing her denial of admission to the former school not for academic reasons, mind you; she knows the education in Berkeley is world-class. Amy is appealing because she wants to live at home while finishing up her college education. She’s blessed to be in a position where her family could easily afford to have her live in on-campus housing anywhere she was accepted, but she still wants to be close to her parents.
I’ve had a number of students like Amy. True, a very high percentage of community college students have limited financial means. Living at home throughout their academic careers is a necessity, not a choice. But I’ve also met many, many students whose families did have the wherewithal (or the financial aid) to send them away to college — but who nonetheless chose to remain at home, picking Los Angeles-area schools over superb colleges and universities farther away.
Even after a dozen years teaching in this multi-cultural greenhouse called Pasadena City College, it’s hard for me to fathom why folks who can afford to move away to go to college don’t do so. In my family, no one lives at home while going to college. Indeed, my brother and I bucked a long-standing trend by not leaving the state, though my brother and one sister did end up living and working in the UK. Many of my cousins went as far as they could from California, to schools in Virginia or New York or Illinois. Yes, they were blessed with the resources to do so. But we were also raised with the belief that a truly worth-while college experience hinges on physical distance from one’s family
Before I went off to Cal, parents told me (indeed, everyone in my family told me) that college was not just about getting a formal classroom education. College, we were told, is about having new experiences, creating a new identity, developing one’s own emotional, spiritual, and intellectual autonomy without interference from one’s family of origin! "Two-thirds of your education takes place outside the classroom", I was told. And I believe it now. If I had lived at home, I would have missed staying up until three in the morning arguing politics and religion with my roommates. I would have missed the lessons in financial accountability (and doing my laundry) that were so valuable during my college years. I would have missed the opportunity to find out who Hugo really was. (Even as I write that, I recognize my own use of the fallacy post hoc ergo propter hoc.)
I’ve had this discussion about "moving away" with many people. My office mate and I have radically different views. He tells me that this obsession with independence and autonomy is "a white thing" (he’s Latino). From what I can see, he seems to be right more often than not. Students from families that have recently immigrated to this country, as well as Hispanic and Asian students, tend to be the ones most eager to live close to home. Perhaps they aren’t eager to live at home until they get to the bachelor’s degree, but their parents are worried about them and pressure them to stay under their roof. (I say again, I’m only questioning those who have the financial means to live outside the home while going to school. I’m quite sympathetic to those who are forced by economic necessity to remain with a parent while completing their education.)
My colleague is on to something, though I suspect it transcends color. For all of my professed evangelicalism (and my brief sojourn amongst the Anabaptists), I’m as fierce a defender of individualism as can be found. My feminism, despite my own misgivings about it, is borderline libertarian. I want to help my students and my teenagers in youth group develop their individual autonomy, their individual selves, their individual identities. For all my professions of faith, I still see offering people "choices" as among the highest of moral imperatives in a good society. I want my teenagers to be able to extricate themselves from the constraints of their families and go off to find liberation in the dorms and the leafy green quads of American colleges in, if not another time zone, at least another county!
But I’m smart enough to know there’s something shallow about all this. I’ve had too many students in my classes who did leave home at 18, go off to colleges across the country, and then flunk out. Sometimes their setbacks were purely academic; at other times drugs and alcohol (or eating disorders) knocked them for a loop and sent them home to their families. In a few instances, these end up being my best students, largely because they’ve been humbled by their own failures and have resolved to make significant changes. (I recently had one young man in class who had gone off to NYU straight out of high school. Drugs and alcohol led to his flunking out within a year. He came home, went to PCC, worked hard, and is now off at UC Irvine, doing very well, I hear.) The point is, some young people may not be emotionally ready to handle the freedoms that come with living away from home and eighteen. Young people mature at different rates, and some may simply not be ready for complete independence.
At the risk of getting flamed, I wonder too if recently-immigrated families are more mistrustful of the places to which they are sending their children. In families where a college education is a multi-generational norm, parents (such as mine) had their own experiences living away from home to reflect upon when they got ready to send their kids off to college. Parents who have experienced the joys and freedoms of living on-campus themselves seem much more likely to be eager to offer that same privilege to their kids. But families who come from parts of the world where kids rarely move out before marriage may be far more reticent to allow their daughters, or even their sons, to move away to a strange place in what may still be a strange land. That "sounds right", but I don’t know of any evidence to back it up.
This morning, I’m thinking about my family, scattered as we are across this country and across the European continent. I think of my sister in Leeds; my other sister in San Francisco; my brother in Exeter; my mother in Carmel; my father in Santa Barbara; my cousins in DeKalb and Anchorage and Charlottesville and New York and Tucson and Seattle and Boulder and Montecito and Charleston and Karlsruhe, Hamburg, and Vienna. Does it sometimes make me sad that my family is so dispersed? Occasionally. But it also makes me proud, too. My brother and sisters and cousins have pursued their dreams unconstrained by geography or guilt — what could be more worthwhile than that? If we only see each other at weddings and funerals and other special occasions, it makes our reunions all the more sweet. Once we moved off to college, we all began to make the series of choices that would shape our lives and carry us to the various corners of the earth. We traded physical closeness for the privilege of pursuing our individual dreams, and on balance, I’d say, it was worth it, though the distance sometimes weighs heavily upon us.
I look at my friends who went to college while living at home, who still live near their parents whom they see every weekend. I think, of all things, of the film "My Big Fat Greek Wedding", which seemed, in a remarkable way, to capture (and caricature) some of the distinctions between what I grew up calling (with a touch of self-conscious irony) "our kind of people" and those who arrived in this land more recently. I remember watching that movie and shifting uncomfortably. I felt suffocated just watching the Greek family’s emphasis on togetherness and community — but I also felt just the tiniest twinge of envy. A focus on radical individualism and personal autonomy at the expense of community has a high cost, and it is a cost I have not always paid happily.
So, I wrote a glowing letter for this young woman who’d rather go to UCLA than Berkeley. I told Amy that in my personal opinion, she’d be better off moving out and "finding herself" in a very different environment; of course, that was just my opinion, and it didn’t mean that I wouldn’t try and help her. Amy, born in South Asia and raised in America, simply smiled when I told her this. She thanked me for the letter, and told me, very politely, "Hugo, you just don’t understand."
Sigh. She’s probably right.
I dunno, Hugo. Not all of us dream dreams that take us far away from home. Not all of us need to get away from family to “find ourselves” (seriously, you said that? LOL That was pretty patronizing of you!). Not all of us have the privilege of being able have “sweet reunions” from being far apart. Not all of us enjoy the idea of being strangers, away from a support system. Not all of us can let off worrying about our kids the way you expect to do in the future. I mean, dude, if you can comprehend that being far away from home can be extremely disastrous for some… :P
I can relate to the idea of wanting to move away from college, because I have been, mroe often than not, kept under wraps by my parents. It’s a cultural thing; I would have njoyed the experience of having lived abroad. But it was my fault; my parents didn’t wnat me to live abroad while in school..I would have enjoyed the opportunity to study while abroad.
Ah well, I can relate quite well to what is being said here. In my hometown, in my high school, EVERYONE went to college, there was no choice in go/don’t go. The choice was about where, and EVERYONE wanted to get into the best out-of-state college they could. The peer pressure to get into an Ivy or close to one was immense. Only a handful went to the in-state university, and for most of those it was a question of money. Out of my high-school class, about 1/3 are still in my hometown (didn’t leave and/or returned after school). What’s the other commonality? Common race, common SES, common religion, and few recent immigrant families. So when Hugo talks about this being an ethnic, class thing, I can really see it.
As much as I am culturally primed to agree with you, Hugo dear… yeah, it’s culture-bound. Your post makes a nice beginning at working it out, but you have a way to go. I’d love to see you write more about this issue, because the way you talk yourself through these processes is really illustrative.
Hugo, I took your advice to heart and did what I always wanted to do: go “away” to college. However, my dream school happened to be a Los Angeles area one. I sincerely hope that you don’t believe leaving Los Angeles is best for everyone.
Mount Saint Mary’s College is very, very Catholic. It is also largely made up of non-white students. Many of these students come from traditional families. Some students come from all over the country (one of my good friends is from San Francisco, others are from the East Coast, and one is from Alaska). However, a large percentage of the students are from L.A. Many of us go home on the weekends (myself included). I initially expected to not want to go home at all, but I CRAVE going home on Fridays now.
My college experience has not been dampened in any way by my going home on the weekends. I can come and go as I please now, which is a freedom that I have never known before.
I suppose I am saying this because this is a post that I frequently think about. I have been meaning to talk to you about my experience at MSMC, as it is an all-girls, Catholic, and largely non-White college. Many of the girls are in my position. They are living away from home, but things like “independence” and “finding yourself” are not necessarily ideals with which they were raised. Just because we’re not all WASPs from privileged backgrounds whose elders encouraged “finding yourself” doesn’t make our college experience any less valuable.
My father went to college and stayed home during this time. He found a job not too far (both college and job in Montreal - where his parents lived).
I went for a single semester in college. Flunked it badly, and started working after. I doubt I would have liked dorm-life, even if I had the money and didn’t flunk my semester. By the way, I flunked over depression.
For one, being in single-sex dorms when you’re trans is bound to drive you crazy. And two, I wasn’t ready to be independant, and I might not be even now, 10 years later (at 27), though I’m better than I was then. Being in heavy depression (for 20+ years), having Asperger syndrome and lacking any sort of non-family social network plays a number on your ability to be independant.
If I was to return to school, I would still stay home, with my boyfriend.
As best I can recall, my home situation had become less oppressive when I made my belated, GED-launched escape to college. But I was still not well equipped to deal with snarking and backstabbing from dorm-mates, and a dorm-head-couple that colluded with them–not to mention sexual harassment by my sole friend there. Such victories as I had over a simpering health-class teacher only partly made up for this. I bounced tween several schools with mediocre grades before dropping out and eventually finding intermittent work in blue-collar areas.
It was assumed by all that I would go to college, as some people had this delusion that I was unusually smart. They did not want to imagine that their genes or their work had still resulted in a defective specimen. But as a person with elusive learning/memory disabilities, and no help for them, as well as social deficits that were partly externally caused, I don’t know if I would have made it anywhere else either. A person could be a bit smart in one area but have problems in another, and when help isn’t provided for those problems, the smart parts might not be enough to overcome much.
From day one I could have used a better support network than I had. This may have made me denigrate the importance of support networks in general, but now that I do have a bit of one I see indeed how important this is, and how seeing these people infrequently does not do it for me; I guess I need regular contact. I have never had enough loyal friends/supporters, and do not know if I will ever be able to truly be one myself.
The class thing is a bit distant for someone who has felt since day one that “my kind of people” exist nowhere on earth, that I wound up here by mistake. But by same token I won’t dismiss its virulence for those who ran afoul of it more directly.
I think the vaunted American or Western emphasis on individuality and so on is iilusory, as anyone who actually manifests it draws fire from all corners, whether it was a boy with long hair in the 60’s or a fat woman in the ’00’s, or an pre-op trans-neauter asexual anytime. This country wants everyone to pull his or her own weight, but isn’t half so quick to grant everyone his or her freedom and props, if he or she happens to fall outside class, race, gender norms etc. as well as being neuro-atypical, or just happens to run into bad luck career-wise. I can’t say all this as well as I wish I could. Some of us get denied our share of community early on, and then get accused of putting our individual desires ahead of said community, and this double-bind crap gets old right quick.
I could not, for any young person, claim to know whether staying at home in college, going to another town, or another country, would be best for providing them the support they need. I am glad that people on this blog are putting some real thought into it and listening to/learning from those whose stories are different.
I can speak from having done things both ways. I went to college to a town just over an hour’s drive from my parents’ home. I grew up in a cookie-cutter suburb of Minneapolis and chose a college in small-town southern Minnesota. In my mind, it was a different enough atmosphere to feel like I was going “away” to college, yet close enough to be able to go home on the occasional weekend. At the time, it was an excellent choice when I had no idea how I would fare living without my parents. Then junior year I lived in Paris, something I’d always dreamed about, and definitely a far cry from the farming community where I had been attending college. To this day I reflect on that time as the best year of my life. Personal growth was exponential, my language skills improved drastically and I gained independence and confidence in droves. I understandably did NOT want to come home, but academic obligations dictated I must. Senior year back in small town Minnesota was tough after living in the City of Lights. After graduation I lived at home and worked while saving money to pursue graduate education, which I did about a year and a half after graduation. I took off yet again to a foreign land for 15 months, but this time was different. It lacked the carefree spirit of my junior year abroad. Whether that was because of the intense nature of my studies, or that life was happening back home in MN and I could not be there (mom’s cancer diagnosis, brother’s serious motorcycle accident, parent’s divorce) I’m not sure. The point is, now that I was older and experiencing more of life’s responsibilities, tragedies and obligations, being so far away from home wasn’t so appealing anymore. After my program ended, I spent a few months in Miami before landing once again in Minnesota. Now my feet are firmly planted here despite friends living in D.C. or Seattle inviting me to follow their lead and join them.
What have I learned from all my globe-trotting and adventure seeking behavior? I have gained invaluable knowledge about myself and how I operate. I have learned what I need to be happy, grounded and productive. I adapt well, I like to think my cultural sensitivity is rather well-honed, and I can survive just about any kid of weather- with the caveat of knowing that it is for a finite amount of time. The bottom line is that I need familiarity and my family nearby. Losing my mom’s proximity to an out-of-state move earlier this year was devastating to me, even at almost 30 years old. I say, only half-jokingly, that having my mom around is a more potent anxiolytic than anything a pharmaceutical company can manufacture. But were it not for my experiences of living abroad and trying new things, I wouldn’t know this. I would always wonder what life might have been like if I’d moved back to France permanently like a high school friend did. Sure, I envy his ability to hop a train to all of Europe for a long weekend get-away, but I also know how hard it is for him to be so far away from his family, and to me, the trade off I’m out. I dream of when my mom and her husband move back to Minnesota and we can have our mother-daughter dates again; I hope that happens before I have children of my own so their grandma can be involved in their day-to-day growing up, something I never had.
The bottom line in the narrative is this: yes, living away from home is important, even if the most valuable lesson you learn is to turn around and go straight back where you came from!
It’s cultural. here in Australia 80-90% of uni students live at home while they go to uni. That’s because most of the population live in a few major cities; that’s also where the unis are. For us, that’s normal. Some kids, depending on finances, move out to flat before they complete their degrees, the majority can’t afford to. Student dorm accommodation is only enough for a minority of students, generally country kids who have come to the city for education..There’s simply no expectation that our kids leave home at 18, and most of us would say that’s a bit young. Our kids are more likely to spread there wings when they finish their degrees — many travel overseas for a while once they have the wherewithal to earn their own way, then most return to live not too far away from their parents.
Er, I don’t think college is like that for more people. I don’t think it was a time for huge personal growth and finding myself. Certainly I grew and changed a bit because I grew older etc. but frankly for whatever reason I had a hard time making meaningful connections with people there and only made one “true” friend. I already knew who I was and now, six years late I’m a different person but not a radically different person. I don’t think I’m that unusual. I don’t think that Hugo with his very different personality would have missed out on his college experience if he was geographically close to his family.
I think that Hugo for all his evident deep affection and closeness with his family is not as emotionally intimate with his family as some people are. As I am for example. Not having the support (the physical presence) of the people you trust most when you have an emotional upheaval is very… depressing. I moved clear across the country for law school and I never came remotely close to dropping out or anything like that, by outcome metrics I’ve dealt very well with it, but damn I’ve really, genuinely and more or less constantly missed my family. Reunions are no substitute and are not at all similar to actually sharing your life with people who love you so much.
Now that I type that I think that’s what it’s all about.
A lot of Americans, white upper class Americans especially, don’t think you’re supposed to share your life with your parents after 18. And I disagree. Sharing your life with those you love seems a no brainer to me.
I’m a white woman who went away to college and I’m very glad I did so. I would have missed out on the late-night discussions and all the other things you mention if I had lived at home. However, my alma mater was only an hour away from home, far enough that I could live on campus and be independent (and get in-state tuition), but not so far that coming home for breaks was a huge hassle. I don’t buy that a worthwhile college experience hinges on distance from one’s family. You can be just as independent one hour from home as you can ten hours from home.
And furthermore, going out of state for college is simply foolish, in my opinion, unless you can get a scholarship and/or have the financial means to pay for it out of pocket. Or maybe if there’s something very specific that you know you want to study that’s only offered at a few schools around the country. The vast majority of the time, though, out-of-state schools are simply not worth the debt you’re going to rack up.
After college, I married someone I had met at college and we settled in our hometown. My parents live 15 minutes away, and my in-laws are 5 minutes away. It’s wonderful! (Two words: free babysitting!) We also get together frequently, have dinner at each other’s houses, etc. My relatives are scattered all over the country, and I always thought it would be great if we all lived closer. Now I have the experience of extended family nearby, and I love it.
I think there is way too much emphasis on autonomy and individuality in our culture at the expense of family and community. I can’t imagine moving away from the place I love and everything and everyone I’ve ever known for some job, unless I had to because it’s the only job I could get.
I do realize, however, that I’m looking that this issue from my perspective. I’m very lucky that a) my husband and I get along very well with both sides and have few in-law issues and b) we grew up in a large metropolitan area (the DC area), which has a lot of culture, things to do, jobs, etc. It’s the sort of place a lot of people move *to.* The decision to stay here after college was a no-brainer. If I had grown up in a tiny town in the middle of nowhere, with no job opportunities, I think I would been much more likely to move away. I would still want to live close to family, though, no more than a few hours if possible. I also realize that not everyone gets along with their families so well, and some people even come from abusive backgrounds and would be perfectly justified in getting as far away as possible. Also, a lot of it has to do with my personality. I am much more family-oriented than career-oriented, and much more of a “work to live” person than a “live to work” person. And my husband is the son of Indian immigrants, so he’s from a more family-oriented culture.
I do think all this stuff about “finding yourself” and “creating a new identity” is largely B.S. Though, again, maybe I’m just looking at it from my perspective. I knew I wanted to be a writer when I was 10 and I’ve had a strong Catholic faith since I was about 12, so I feel like I “knew who I was” long before I went to college. I did mature at college and deepen my Catholic faith, but I feel like I just became a more mature version of who I already was.
I guess in a nutshell, going away to college was a great experience (my parents would have annoyed me greatly had I lived at home), but in sort of a self-indulgent way. It wasn’t at all *necessary* for my “identity.” At least that was my experience.
I’m curious to know how your opinions on this might have adjusted in the last 4 years. In this post I’m catching an undercurrent of mobility = privilege, while staying home is something done because people are “reticent to allow their daughters, or even their sons, to move away to a strange place in what may still be a strange land.” I think you’re really underestimating the autonomy in the choice to stay home.
(That said, I went away to university, and that worked for me. Staying close to home worked well for others. It helps if you live somewhere with great schools nearby.)
Anyway, I’ve talked to my mom and a lot of her friends about the circumstances surrounding their moves to the U.S. It’s not that they were *forced* to emigrate, exactly, but what are you gonna do if you’ve gotten training in a specific professional field, the job opportunities are more plentiful in the U.S. (or Australia) than in your home country, which is right in the middle of a region with a war going on, and you’ve got the most earning potential in your family and who else is gonna pay for your little brother’s education? And then you’re living somewhere where the weather is cold and horrible, and yeah you have friends, but not the *thick* social network you used to have, and you can’t visit your family for years, and you miss your brother growing up even though you’re happy you helped him get the education he wanted, and even the long distance calls were expensive back then so all you get are letters once a month. And you miss the food, the stuff you grew up on, the stuff that came out of the ground where you lived, that became the stuff your body is made of.
Don’t you think, after all that, that STAYING PUT would seem like a privilege? My mom never tried to stop me from moving away to go to school (that’d have been a bit hypocritical) but she still feels sorry for me that I move so much.
You know Hugo, at the end of musings of yours such as this one I often find myself drawing what to me seems like an obvious conclusion: it depends on the person, the family, and a host of other particulars, several of which you outline.
I will concur that in most of the pictures you paint here that the family that’s outlined is happy and functional and that indeed is a factor that plays a part.It’s also interesting to me that you view your college experience as consummately good since that was one of the scenes of your addiction and mental illness.
In my own case, my family, my socioeconomic status, my culture and my aspirations, subsequent college experience and life path to date all seem to have affected the outcome of my life thus far…..yet it didn’t affect my brothers and sisters the same way and I’m sure would affect others differently too. In my case it was Jewish, wealthy, dysfunctional, a geographic and personal split between my family of origin when I was young, going to college away from home, and a generally difficult experience of life that has sadly not resolved itself yet…..although much is better than it was. I know families that are perfectly wonderful that are far flung, others that live within a mile of each other and don’t speak. Some that went away and got lost and some that stayed home and are fine……and vice versa.
If one of the points you’re making is that you don’t have first hand experience growing up in a clannish culture with a different value system then obviously that’s true. But you’re trying to understand it and getting a crah course in it with your wife and mother in law. If another point is that you’re own culture and values ought not to affect your feelings about exactly what path someone else should take, well that’s right too.
Schala,
You and I have much in common. Hang in there.
Class aside, I think this can sometimes be a parental control issue.
As a WASP who grew up at the lower end of the middle class, I was practically propelled out of the house to an elite college about a day’s drive from our suburb. My parents met at a land-grant university, and my mother had started college while living at home. Both wanted me to have an experience they would have enjoyed but for finances, and treasured the idea that I would go “away” to college.
My aunt and uncle, while of the same general social class, went fundamentalist while my parents stayed in a traditional Christian denomination. My cousins were strongly encouraged to attend local state colleges, where my aunt could monitor them more closely.
There is a lot of family baggage tied up in this, but honestly, I think my sister and I got the better end of the deal. My cousins have very little interaction with people outside of their chosen group, and seem either shocked or unable to comprehend “outsiders.”
While I do sometimes wish (especially with a toddler) for more family close by, there are trade-offs to constant interaction with relatives. My friends with local family often complain about the way their children are cared for by relatives, and others have had cozy childcare arrangements rendered moot by illness or injury.
I suppose it is all relative.
I think it depends what’s been modeled for a person as well. My husband and I both live far from our families, but then, we lived far from our grandparents when we grew up. So while it doesn’t feel ideal, it definitely feels normal. In addition, both of our families moved a lot so there is no one place that really feels “home.” Add my parents’ divorce, my husband’s specialty field, and our sense of adventure, and I am relatively content living far away. But there are definitely times when I feel wistful, and I realize that despite the dysfunction in my family, it is my family. We only have so many years on this earth together, and it’s a bummer not to see each other more often. I also think we are modeling for ur kids that it’s OK to live really far away.