College-Bound?

Our daughters will go to college, almost certainly top-tier schools.

I say this with certainty because that is who we are, as a family. Coines are smart, we're hard-working, and we go to college. All of us, for generations. We have Harvard, William & Mary, Yale, MIT, and other elite schools in our pedigree. Success and failure in our family is measured not by college versus no college, but by the reputation of the college. Even the less-motivated students among our clan go to pretty good schools.

Note I wrote "less-motivated," rather than stupid or lazy. We're all smart, even those of us who don't achieve as actively as the rest. That's who we are.

That isn't just our family, either. It is our class. Though few in my family line have ever been even financially comfortable, not to mention well-off, we view ourselves as upper middle class. Upper middle class people go to college. They live in towns like Westport, Connecticut and Naples, Florida. They are teachers and professors, doctors, lawyers, business executives, entrepreneurs, and artists. Their kids go to college.

Do you see where I'm going with this? Ayla and Maryn are college-bound because they are growing up in the right family for such things. They live in the right neighborhood. Their friends and role models are all of the class that assumes college.

There's nothing wrong with this - au contraire! There's everything right about it. We Coines, we upper-middle-class types, assume success. It isn't even a question. So guess what follows, by default?

When I was a kid, no one ever asked me if I would go to college. Not once, not ever. I was asked where I would go, all the time; what I would be when I grew up. My first answer was architect, until I realized it involved more math than art. I moved on to "Psychologist (Ph.D., of course) if I fail; novelist if I succeed." I was eight when I made this career change. I didn't change my mind again until my fifth year of college, when I substituted entrepreneur for psychologist as my fall-back position.

When I was in high school, every last kid in my graduating class went on to college. 443 out of 443. And I never knew of one pregnancy among my peers. I'm sure they happened - what are the chances they wouldn't? But not one girl in my high school had a baby. Not one, out of almost 2,000 kids. I didn't meet anyone who knew of a teen mother until I left for college: not every one of my college friends came from an affluent town.

See what I'm getting at?

Our daughters are destined for college, and for an upper-middle-class (UMC) life. No matter what happens to them along the way, UMC will be their expectation, and it will be their default position. If they fail for a while, they will surely rise, because UMC is their level of comfort. It is where they experience equilibrium. It is in their DNA.

...Except that it isn't in their DNA, not at all. Imagine if they were born in Immokalee, or Golden Gate, or East Naples - still white, still beautiful, with quick brains full of potential, but poor, surrounded by poverty, their life-models, peers, and every expectation poor. UMC? They wouldn't even identify with the lower-middle-class.

In that case, what would we say about them? That they will go to college? That they may go to college? That they can go to college?

I'll tell you exactly what we'd say, because this is what my peers and I discuss when we talk about transforming lives in the poor areas of our community.

We'd say that they will probably get pregnant and go on welfare while still a teen. That they'll most likely drop out of high school. That if we can just keep them out of gangs and off the streets, that will be a great success. That we'd like to provide them with a trade, so that they can do better than just picking tomatoes or cleaning toilets at the Holiday Inn.

We would expect them to fail. Mitigating failure is seen as a great success.

My colleagues and I rarely talk about bridging the gap between Immokalee and Port Royal. Mostly, we talk about helping poor kids bridge the gap between their current expectation and a living wage.

How can we even talk about kids now living in Mexico, or Nigeria, or Bangladesh? It's too overwhelming. For half of the people on earth, eating every day is more of a goal than college may ever be. Just getting to Immokalee so they can live twenty to a dilapidated trailer is what they live their lives for. How can we even talk about helping these people go to a top-tier college, or move to Port Royal?

I hate this. I hate it so badly, it wakes me up at 4 am. I hate it so badly that I've all but stopped working on my businesses. I can't stand the thought that we'd all be happy just to help people waste their lives less than they are now; that no one's even discussing making the socio-economic scale equally accessible to all.

I'm eternally grateful that Jane and I were raised with the expectation of success, and that our girls are being raised the same way. I love Port Royal. I love it so much, I want everyone to live in a neighborhood just like it.

...Or to fail so miserably that they're forced to settle for Pelican Bay.

Why aren't we having that discussion for the poor kids in Immokalee, and Golden Gate, and East Naples, and Nepal?