Recently, I hosted one of my best friends (though we call each other sisters, and our kids are cousins) and her niece, who is studying in the U.S. for a semester at our home. She insisted that her niece visit us so that she could experience a small New England town and observe what it is like to achieve the American Dream. Fresh out of China, her niece was taking it all in, observing a lot and saving her observations until I was out of the room.
Getting to the American Dream
Yun and I met in graduate school at Boston College (BC). We were both outliers in our own ways. In fact, our entire doctoral program produced outliers—a fact that I would not become aware of until I attended my first conference of the National Council of Measurement in Education and realized that there were almost no women, a few Asian folks, and I was the only Black person I could see. While the fields of statistics and psychometrics are male-dominated, our graduate program was majority women. Aside from the crosses in every classroom at BC and the occasional imposter syndrome, I generally felt like I belonged.
Yun and I went through the ups and downs of the graduate school journey together. I still recall vividly coming back to campus after a doctor had suggested that I abort my 22-week-old baby. It wasn’t his suggestion, but rather how insistent he was that scared me. I had made tough decisions before about whether I was ready to be a parent and the kind of life that I could provide a child at earlier phases of my life, but this time it was different. We had planned him. The doctor did not read the full chart. He erred about the sex of the baby and the location of the cyst they had found. He indicated that insurance would not cover the procedure and that there could be complications. I had researched and read voraciously about Down syndrome, cysts, brain development, and multiple language acquisition. I was prepared to have this baby!
I went back to campus crying so much that I vomited. Yun was by my side, consoling me and getting someone to clean up the area. She helped me refocus. I got over the experience and we focused on passing our comprehensive exams. We had an eight-hour test, four hours of statistics problems with just a calculator, another four hours with a dataset to analyze, and three essay prompts to respond to. Then another data set to take home and five more questions to answer over five days. If we passed all the tests, we could sit for the oral exam. There were five of us who sat for the comps that year. Three passed; two did not make it. I passed, and Yun passed with distinction (a significant detail that she didn’t recall until I reminded her). We finished our coursework in two years, a feat that most people told us we could not accomplish. I took my electives in finance and organizational organization and she in law and sociology. Today, she leads a team of legal data scientists for the California Bar Association. I guess we both followed our interests and still use our discipline as our foundation.
We finished our dissertations. I gave birth to my first child a week and a half after my oral comps and my second child two years later. Yun graduated a year ahead of me. I received my diploma with the two babies I birthed, along with the dissertation, as my husband cheered me from the audience.
Keeping the Dream Alive for All
Today, we can say that we have achieved our respective versions of the American Dream. We own our homes. We can provide for our respective children and loved ones in the U.S. and abroad. Our kids are already surpassing us. We are saving for retirement. We have health insurance. We have time for civic participation and volunteering. We can vacation once a year. We are living a life of impact, which is what we both value most about achieving the American Dream. We have made it. Our lives would be vastly different in Haiti and in China.
As is always the case when we are together, on a long drive to visit another friend from graduate school, we reflected on how much harder it is for others, including native-born Americans from humble beginnings, to achieve the American Dream.
The median price of a home in Massachusetts today is over $600,000. Boston is one of a number of cities where families need to make over $300,000 to comfortably raise kids. When I look at these facts, they say to me, as a college president, that my institution needs to have rigorous career advising and financial planning for our students at Urban College of Boston. I want them to pursue their dreams of becoming early childhood educators, human services professions, social workers, etc. and be smart about their short- and long-term education and career plans.
When the median net worth of U.S. Blacks living in Massachusetts is $8 and huge disparities are also evident in Hispanic versus White wealth, we have a real problem. As educators, we ought to work hard to ensure that higher education will indeed help improve outcomes for our learners. At Urban College, we educate mostly women and people of color and are embracing our responsibility to educate them about how they can build individual, family, and community wealth. We must do our part to keep the American Dream alive for all.
