Upward mobility has “ethical costs” for first-generation students, argues Jennifer Morton, a philosophy professor at City College, in Moving Up Without Losing Your Way.
University of Texas at El Paso is one of the top universities in the country for improving students’ upward mobility.
“We rarely tell students that their success may come at the expense of some of the things that they hold most dear — their relationships with family and friends, their connection to their communities, and their sense of who they are and what matters to them.”
She interviews “strivers,” such as Jeron, who grew up in public housing in Austin and is now a college counselor. He fought to avoid being “dragged” down by his family and friends, he says.
Jeron’s dilemma “is a fundamental tension in every free society,” writes Naomi Schaefer Riley in Upward Futility in Commentary.
Morton suggests that college students whose parents are middle-class and went to college subscribe to the “independent cultural model” —whereby individuals are free to pursue their own preferences and interests independent of family and community interests — while first-generation students have an “interdependent cultural model,” in which the family and community’s interests are prioritized. The problem with this notion, however, is that there are many non-middle-class families and communities that prioritize a student’s achievement.
. . . This is certainly true of many immigrant families. The whole point of coming across the border or across the ocean, according to immigrant parents and grandparents, was to allow younger generations to succeed.
Another striver, Raja, never spoke up in class until Morton and Raja’s brother told him he needed to share his views to succeed in his chosen profession of medicine, Riley writes
Morton says that this “may seem like a success story,” but she also worries about Raja’s “story of acculturation,” particularly the idea that he is “forced to reinvent himself to fit into the culture.”
. . . In a perfectly just society, Morton imagines, individuals could excel without having to make sacrifices, and young men and women could succeed economically and bring their entire community along with them.
“In this reality, the best way we know to lift people out of poverty is to offer them individual freedom, argues Riley. She suggests first-generation students read books such as Great Expectations, The Rise of David Levinsky or The Joy Luck Club to learn that “such tensions are neither new nor easy and can be resolved only by those who live through them.”