Is the American Dream a fairy tale?
Confessions of a first-generation college student
It is late spring. Goldfinches are singing and the cottonwood trees are showering the streets with their fluffy seeds. I don’t recall where I am, at the high school or the local library, but I’m indoors at a desk staring at a computer screen. It’s an Apple IIe with an old monitor, the kind with a convex screen, pixelated green text, and a square cursor that flashes like a marshmallow against the black background. I want to be outdoors, tossing a baseball or riding my BMX bike, but I’ve been drawn here because I’ve learned of a program designed to tell me what my career ought to be.
There are ten questions about my hobbies, my personality, what I most want to accomplish in life, what I want my average day to look like, how much I want to travel. I can choose one of six or eight answers to each question. Whatever unique combination I select is supposed to add up to the best career for me.
I desperately want the program to say I ought to be a professional baseball player, so I pick outdoor hobbies like hunting and fishing. I tell the computer that I am competitive by nature (obviously), that I prefer financial security to great wealth (I wouldn’t expect to be an All-Star), that I want my average day to include a balance of physical activity and leisure, and that I enjoy travel (all those road games). After I enter my final answer, the computer whirs and clicks for a few moments, and then delivers the verdict: I should be a military officer. My belly sinks. I picture myself jogging in the desert in combat boots, sleeping on a cot in a canvas tent like those I’ve seen on M*A*S*H, screaming in the face of a recruit whose uniform has come untucked. It isn’t me.
I try again, changing a few answers, drumming my fingers on the desk as the computer thinks it over. Another verdict: firefighter. I let out my breath in disappointment, push my chair back, and walk away.
The program asked nothing about my gender, my cultural background, my religious affiliation, or my economic status. It was not curious about whether I hoped to marry or have children or whether I might already be a teenage parent. None of the questions asked about my grade point average or test scores. The point, it seemed, was less to predict my future than to indulge a fantasy about who I could become if I followed my natural instincts. It was as if I were both a blank slate, upon which any destiny might be written, and a cryptic text, filled with a code only the computer could unlock. There was something both hopeful and cynical about the whole thing, and it left me a little angry and confused. I should have known better than to expect a computer to tell me who I would become, but part of me wanted a simple answer in place of the mystery of what I would do with my life.
I’m a little surprised, in hindsight, that I felt so free to dream about the future. My family wasn’t wealthy. We were comfortable enough by Montana standards, where you can get by on very little with a large garden and two elk in the freezer, but even in our small town I was aware of occupying a lower socio-economic rung than many of my classmates. Most of my family role models were working-class, and I paid for all of my clothes in high school by selling huckleberries that I’d picked by hand. Yet I never once imagined that I would be a logger, miner, or sawmill worker, and no one in my family ever pressured me one way or the other.
Last week I wrote about Tara Westover’s memoir Educated, particularly her sense that a future as a wife, mother, and midwife had already been written for her. Today I want to compare our experiences as first-generation college students.