There’s a warmth I associate with my childhood when I remember how boundless my imagination once was. I was a detective, a superhero, a psychic, and – in my favorite scenario – a teacher. A strangely realistic occupation for an eight-year-old to fantasize about, but an endless source of excitement nonetheless.
My “students” were my neighbors – a pair of blonde-haired girls who lived a few doors down and were good-natured enough not to mind my subpar lectures on earth science and grammatical revisions in slashes of red ink. They’d listen intently as I’d recite lessons I had learned mere hours before at school (that is, in my real classroom with my real teacher) and issue out compliments and corrections alike. I even saved a bit of pocket money to go out and buy new stickers and pens on the weekends.
At some point, it had been settled that our spare bedroom would be the hub for an
imaginary classroom, and that the old, grandiose desk sitting parallel to the wall would, naturally, become the workspace for my pupils. Our fun would last for hours, only interrupted by my mother, who’d pull us out of the spare bedroom with the promise of sliced apples and Ichiban ramen with rolled ham. My friends and I would come running to the kitchen island, laughing and slurping on noodles as Mom poured us a glass of lemonade and asked about our day in the classroom. I’d watch her face as she carefully nodded along when we recounted what we had learned and smiled at the “100%” I had messily scribbled on their multiplication tables.
With a natural curiosity in our academic escapades, it is safe to say that my mother has a fondness for education that mirrors my own. But, while I write this on the eve of my university graduation at the age of 21, her early twenties were marked with diapers and 9-to-5s as she worked through parenthood with my two older siblings. It took her years to be able to regularly commit to classes at the local community college, and a few more years after that to finish off a B.A through online courses facilitated by Chapman University. When I’d ask her about her time in college, she’d remark that she was the oldest one in her class. “And my group partners were as old as your brother,” she’d laugh as I grimaced. I promised that I wouldn’t lose sight like she seemingly had. No community college. No online classes. No project partners that were younger than I was.
As I outgrew the spare bedroom and moved away from childhood friends, the stark reality was that if I wanted to avoid my mother’s unconventional route to higher education, I would have to chip away at the SATs and volunteer hours and niches that would make me stand out as a stellar student in a pool of millions. Academia was rapidly losing its glisten, cheapened to a three or four letter abbreviation that could be recognized across the country. To attend UCLA and USC was to be the paragon of a West Ranch High School student, with the school being a near-direct pipeline to the two campuses. And if you weren’t going to either, then you were almost certainly in line to attend some other top university in the country.
It didn’t help, either, that my local community college was demonized. College of the Canyons? No, College of the Champions, students would snidely remark. I’d later come to hear a C.O.C advisor meekly whisper that there was no point in tabling at my school – West Ranch High School simply thought themselves above their lowly community college.
But as I’d weep over SAT prep tests, my mother would cut apples slices for me and wonder why I was desperately bending myself into shapes to fit in with my cohort. I flunked the SATs, burned out of my extracurriculars, passed on application papers, and even got into a couple out-of-state schools whose cost of attendance was so astronomically high that I could no longer justify going to university when the community college down the street was offering free associate's degrees. My resources were exhausted, I was exhausted, and so I resigned to enrolling at the dreaded College of the Champions.
My classes were perfectly fine (albeit online because of the pandemic), and in a strange twist of fate, I ended up getting a job at the college a few months after I enrolled. My new job was to be an “Online Educational Resources (OER) Specialist” – a role that entailed editing free textbooks for students. It wasn’t too soon after that I’d learn that my job was more than making a couple revisions here and there on a .Word file. It was breaking barriers to education: barriers that had stopped kids from affording college, being able to reach out for help, and, in the case of my own mother, prevented her from obtaining a college degree.
While I spent the next two years chugging along with the math problems and the English
lectures, my greatest investment of time was spent towards radically redefining what I
considered accessible. I learned that California students spend almost $1000 on textbooks alone on an annual basis. I learned from my blind coworker that she wasn’t able to read some of our work documents because the file couldn’t be read by her screenreader. I learned that community college was more than just an embarrassment for West Ranch High School students – it was a stepping stone and even a redemption arc for the students who were barred from the so-called “conventional” academic pathway. And the more and more I’d keep learning about higher education, the more I’d come to accept that academia was not a cozy spare bedroom in a suburban neighborhood. It was a brick wall. While some students are equipped with a rope to hoist themselves over, others can only stare at it with empty hands and wonder what sort of fantastical things lie on the other side.
I’m inclined to say that money would fix all of these problems. Faculty must be paid livable wages and students need reasonably priced education. But to chalk it up to administration coughing up a few more dollars and calling it a day would be a disservice to the people who never imagined that they could have a higher education in the first place. A disservice to the students who are disabled and can’t navigate through their course materials, a disservice to the parents who can’t attend in-person classes because they have a child at home.
Complex problems require complex solutions. Developing, training, listening – it will take creative, realistic thought to give all students (current and prospective) the platform to get up and say, “Hey, I need a little help here,” and for universities to respond back with, “Okay, I hear you. Here’s how we can assist.”
It’s hard not to think about myself as a mere pebble in the stream, lying limply as the problem rushes over me and the thousands of other pebbles in the bank. This is an enormous issue to tackle, and I am one person. I don’t even know yet what job title I need to get to demand the change I want to see. But, at the very least, I need to know that I can one day tell some 18-year-old girl that her world won’t collapse because she went to community college instead of a four-year university. I need her to know that there are resources for her to succeed, that the key is out there, that she just needs to ask how to unlock it. And, importantly, I need her to want the people with children, disabilities, low-income backgrounds – the people who academia has, historically, had a hearty scoff at – to succeed just as she will.
Be it through advocacy or education, I want to ensure that they’ll all live in a system that devotes itself to accessibility, affordability, and accountability. A system where everyone has the means to hurl themselves over that brick wall, rope in hand, and catch a glimpse of the other side. A system where she knows that her mother never truly lost sight of what was important to her – she just had to take the long way around.
“Accessibility isn’t an expectation, but we need to put in the work to make it one,” I’ll one day tell that 18 year-old girl as she dries her tears and gathers the strength to move forward, “It’s time to stop imagining – and time to start doing.”
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