Students: Working-Class Collegians: The True Believers

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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."