Luck
On my flight across the country I knew I would face some culture shock and homesickness during college. But it arrived much earlier than I expected and in the form of a quesadilla. It was the week before New Student Orientation and I was in the middle of nowhere. I hadn’t taken a shower in days, the altitude was strangling my poor Miami lungs, and darkness was beginning to fall in the California wilderness. With the rest of the cooking team, I huddled over the warmth of our makeshift stoves and pans. Somehow, we came up with the crazy idea to make quesadillas in no man’s land. I loved the idea, I love cheese, I love quesadillas! “Oh hey say that again, that’s so cool.” Quesadillas? “Wow let me try: Que – sa – di – lahs, man that was terrible.” My fellow backpackers burst out laughing at their terrible Spanish pronunciation. At that moment I paused, wait a minute, am I not in California? Isn’t this the state that used to be part of Mexico? My first week with Stanford classmates and I felt like I’d accidentally ended up in Iowa. That incident was just a taste of how far away Stanford, CA was from Miami, FL and how further still it was from Bogota, Colombia.
It was on Stanford campus that the global educational disparity became very real to me. I noticed that even within the minority of Hispanic students – those who heralded from abroad came from wealthy families. As a low class Colombian, my chances of arriving to an elite American university were almost null. As a low class Colombian-American, my chances grew but still remained quite slim compared to wealthy, white Americans. Examining my experience, I can’t help think of this phenomena on a global scale. Not only do many populations suffer from rampant illiteracy and lack of institutions, the existing institutions across the globe are only interested in upper echelons of society. Even as many governments and agencies gives odes to the importance of education, the reality is that education currently functions as just another way to keep the wealth in the hands of the elite. This occurs at many levels, from the microcosm of a county to the macrocosm of the international stage. The elite universities of America and Europe accept very few international students and most give them little to no financial aid. Through my experience, I hope to illustrate the lack of accessibility of education at every stage.
I was born at the turn of the century in Bogota, Colombia and with many more advantages than many of my countrymen. My parents had both been first generation college students that prided themselves in their degrees. Even though our financial situation was precarious, my mom made sure to ingrain the importance of education from the start. For students both in the US and abroad, this is not the case. Their parents might have just finished secondary school or many might even be illiterate. What they know best might be back breaking menial work. They might want their children to strive further than them but they do not have the tools to guide them. In Colombia, I had the tools. My grandmother taught me how to read when I was a toddler and at age 3 I was being enrolled in a private school. If my life had continued on that trajectory I would have likely ended up either in the National or District Universities. That’s a lot further than many can aspire to. However I could have never aspired to any private university or any institution abroad, it was simply too expensive.
Everything changed when I moved to Miami. At the first instance, I lost many of the tools I had back in Bogota. My parents were divorced, I didn’t speak English, and my legal situation was iffy at best. My mom, the university professor and entomologist, had to clean houses and sell calling cards to survive. This is another way “first world” nations keep out the inferior “third world” citizens. A degree from America or Europe or rising Asian institutions might be recognized anywhere. A degree from Colombia’s public universities is worth nothing in the “first world”. There are so many talented professionals languishing in the US and Europe, wasting away driving taxis and cutting grass. It is the assumption that a university education in a poor country must be much inferior to one in a wealthy country. Meanwhile, I’ve sat through some US college courses at Miami-Dade College that do not rival my mom’s university course load. Another issue was the language barrier. The barrier is no issue when an American goes to a Colombian university, because English has truly become a language of privilege. Thus, in the first one or two years of my stay in Miami I earned the advantage of being able to speak fluent English (in Colombia that’s a privilege to wealthy families who vacation in the US a few times a year).
My mom continued encouraging with the same rigor but with big lack of information. The education system here was completely alien to anything in Colombia. It was only thanks to my elementary school teachers that I discovered the magnet program and began learning French and German. I found myself guiding my mom through the process, translating and explaining and making tough decisions for my own education. This is a similar experience many of my immigrant classmates had to go through, sometimes even having to argue with well-meaning but clueless parents. This is especially a hurdle for students who don’t speak English well or who don’t receive guidance from school staff or who don’t have access to resources or the internet. Many low-income minority students don’t know how to go about preparing for college or about the profuse scholarship or financial aid available. I was lucky that my mom kept pushing me, that my teachers cared about me, and that I found the right resources.
A strong myth in US culture is that of hard work, individualism, the Horatio Alger rags to riches. Reaching Stanford and receiving so much adulation, it might be easy to fall into the “I did it so anyone can do it with hard work” mindset. That would be a delusion. Yes I worked hard, but the reason I am at Stanford is mostly luck. I could’ve worked just as hard and be enrolled in the District University in Bogota without knowing a word of English. As an English major that is a chilling thought. Or maybe I would have followed my older cousins’ paths, who couldn’t afford college with the rising prices and lost motivation in school. Maybe I would’ve made it to the US but I might have never heard of the magnet program, I would have continued going to my local underfunded public schools and received a sub-par education and no college resources. Reflecting on this, I think about all the children over the world with so much potential energy to learn and do great things who will not have the same luck I did. Some will remain in their home countries, oppressed by poverty. A few might make it to institutions of higher learning. Some will make the difficult trip to the US and Europe with their families. They will try to survive undocumented, try to get their papers and their education. Many will be deported. Many will not receive the resources to succeed. And only a few will make it to college.
Over the past few years, I have been giving friends and classmates college counseling at no cost. When I look at the world stage of illiteracy, sexism, and gross income inequality I can’t help feel like I am barely making a difference. But when I realize that next week I am going to help a friend move into his dorm for freshman year at the University of Florida, it feels so worth it. Teachers told him the best he could hope for was a community college, he has only been speaking English for three years, and his family struggled financially. Despite all of that, he had the hard work and luck to pull through and I am glad I was able to contribute to that luck. Today he tells me: I would have never made it here if I finished high school in Colombia. And I nod because it’s true, it’s true for him, it’s true for my Colombian neighbor who was raised in Maine, and it’s true for me. There is a responsibility that us lucky ones have to the millions who are not so fortunate. As I help people individually, I take a look at the system and I know there needs to be a change. Why are there so few opportunity to immigrants and international students? Why are US public schools funded by property tax? Why is standardized testing and college application such an expensive process? There are so many reasons I shouldn’t be here, but now that I am it’s time to solve these issues.