Covid-19 Robs First-Generation Graduates — and Their Families — of a Meaningful Milestone

When Andrew Pérez left Southern California in January for his final semester at Harvard University, he and his mother, Carmen, focused on the next time they would be together. See you at commencement, they told each other.

Graduation was a big deal for the Pérezes — Andrew would be the first of them to earn a college degree. The whole family was coming, including his young nephews, ages 4 and 11. When his parents had helped him get settled at Harvard at the start of his freshman year, Andrew was as much a stranger to the campus as they were. Four years later, he was looking forward to welcoming them to his home, a place steeped in memories and experiences. It was hard to tell who was more excited.

Then, on March 10, an email from Harvard’s president, Lawrence S. Bacow, landed in in-boxes: The campus was closing because of the coronavirus outbreak; classes were moving online. Andrew and other leaders of Primus, the college’s club for first-generation and low-income students, scrambled to troubleshoot: Students needed help to pay for last-minute plane tickets and to find places to store their belongings. (Harvard later offered to cover travel and storage costs.) They worried about returning to crowded homes and spotty internet. Without campus jobs, some wondered how they would pay the bills.

It was late that night when Andrew, at once jangled and exhausted, finally headed back to his room. Suddenly, mid-walk, the realization hit him with the force of a blow: There would be no commencement, at least not the one he had imagined. No ceremony, no cap and gown, no pomp and circumstance. His family would not be there to see him walk, to collect the diploma that he — that they — had worked so hard for.

In the beginning, it wasn’t Andrew’s dream. It was his sister, Jenny, seven years older, who believed in his potential. She came up with art projects for him, corrected his penmanship, and encouraged his academic competitive streak. When it was time for high school, Jenny researched the best ones. That’s how Andrew ended up applying to Loyola High School, a nationally ranked Catholic boys’ school that sends nearly all of its graduates to four-year colleges.

Jenny had been on the path to college herself before a teenage pregnancy derailed those plans. She recently graduated from a nearby community college.

Andrew knew nothing about the world of selective high schools. When he visited Loyola, he was stunned to learn he had to sit for an entrance exam. Pretty easy, one of the other kids said during a break. Andrew knew he had bombed on the test.

The school took a chance on him anyway. His father stretched his machinist’s salary to pay Andrew’s tuition. Every day his mother — a homemaker who, like his father, had emigrated from Mexico — drove him an hour each way from suburban Pico Rivera to Loyola’s manicured campus, near downtown Los Angeles. Teachers offered extra tutoring, fought for him to get into advanced courses, wrote letters of recommendation.

“They made me believe in myself,” he said.

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When it came to choosing a college, he was equally in the dark. Harvard, he said, when people asked, because he knew the name and he knew it was good. One day, he looked up the average grades and SAT scores of admitted Harvard students, and then he put his head down and he studied. When he was accepted early, in the fall of his senior year, he withdrew all of his other college applications. The choice was easy: With Harvard’s generous financial aid, he would pay almost nothing to attend.

Arriving at the university, he had to navigate uncharted waters. His sister couldn’t advise him about roommate problems. His brother, Brian, the oldest, could not tell him what it would be like to live on his own. His parents could not prepare him to cope with homesickness. Later Andrew would co-found a pre-orientation program to help make the transition less rocky for other first-gen and low-income students. His adjustment, he recognized, was smoother than that of some of his classmates. For one, he didn’t have the pressure of working a full-time job on the side to send money back home, as some of his friends did.

Still, he wondered if he belonged. One of his five roommates was a legacy, another was from overseas; several were wealthy. He was the only Latino among them. “Harvard was not created for someone like me,” he wrote in an essay at the end of his first year.

Knowing what to major in — and where that major could lead — was confusing. When he decided to study sociology, his parents were skeptical. What sort of work could that get him? Seeing upperclassmen land good jobs with liberal-arts degrees gave him the confidence to follow his passion. “I realized, hey, I partied with this person, and I know that not all they do is math in their spare time,” Andrew said. “It showed me how much I could do with my degree.”

Nor was his family of much help when he agonized over summer plans, afraid of making the wrong choice: Should he take a congressional internship or travel to South America? Whatever you do will be amazing, his relatives told him. “They didn’t understand how stressed out I was,” he said.

Eventually, Andrew came to see that all around him was opportunity, a chance to expand his horizons, the ability to explore. Yes, his roommates were from different backgrounds, but they exposed him to new perspectives and cultures. “#BroSuite,” they called themselves, and they became Andrew’s closest friends.

“This is what college does,” he said. At Harvard, it was just a matter of which door you chose to open.

Now Andrew was back home, logging on to 7 a.m. Zoom lectures from the living-room sofa and the dining-room table, where he’d fallen asleep writing high-school term papers. He’d become accustomed to his independence, to living on his own. He’d returned to a full house, with his parents, his older brother, his sister Jenny and her husband, and his nephews all under one roof. Once again, his mother was admonishing him to put on a sweater whenever he left the house. As if there were anyplace to go.

Summer breaks had taken him around the globe — interning at a think tank in Argentina, teaching English in China, meeting his boyhood crush, the singer Selena Gomez, while working at a record label — and so he had become a visitor in the home he’d grown up in. This was the longest spell he’d spent in Pico Rivera since he had left for Harvard, and it wasn’t a vacation when he could sleep late, watch movies, and play video games with his nephews. He still had his final semester to complete.

Some of his classmates said they were doing better studying at home than on campus. “Good for them, but that’s not me,” Andrew said. Seminars were OK, a painting course was going better than expected. An introductory coding class was more of a struggle — a pandemic might not be the best time to master a wholly new skill.

When Andrew arrived at Harvard, freed from the discipline of high school, he’d had to learn how to manage his time. When you went to college, you lived with all your friends, he realized, and it was easy to fall into hours-long conversations in the dining hall or someone’s dorm room. When he needed to study or finish a paper, he’d hole up in the library or another place on campus free from distractions. But what do you do when you are forced to shelter in place with seven other people?

He tried to adhere to a schedule, rising at dawn several days a week to tutor Chinese schoolchildren in English. The 15-hour time difference was a hassle, but Andrew felt grateful to have reconnected with a company he’d worked for three summers earlier to earn a little extra money. Daytime was for schoolwork. That had an unexpected silver lining: For once, his family could see firsthand what it meant to be a Harvard student.

After dinner, he would push the living-room furniture to the side and queue up an exercise video. Sometimes his sister or mother would join in, and he tried to interest his older nephew, Jadon, in working out by promising to take him on a trip to Yosemite National Park when California’s travel restrictions were lifted. The whole family had to laugh when sore muscles made it hard for Jadon to bend down after a particularly strenuous session.

At times like those Andrew wondered if things might have been different if he had gone to college closer to his family and friends, if his presence could have had a greater influence. He tried to stay in touch with the kids he’d grown up with, but their paths had diverged a decade earlier. Sometimes, reading group texts, he was reminded that his friends had shared experiences he had missed out on since eighth grade.

The previous fall, as Andrew was going through the speed-dating of management-consulting interviews that is the hallmark of many Harvard senior years, one of his childhood friends took his own life. Just days after Andrew signed an offer letter to work for Oliver Wyman, a top firm, a second friend killed himself, in prison. At college 3,000 miles away, he couldn’t make it to either funeral.

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The deaths sent him into a depression. Here he was, going to Harvard, but he hadn’t been able to help friends in need. “What’s the meaning of this degree if I can’t save the people I love?” he asked himself. He felt guilty about his privilege.

His middle-school friends weren’t that different from his high-school friends or those he met in college. They were just as brilliant and capable. But their circumstances were different, their prospects more narrow. Over time, as his sorrow lifted, Andrew began to see how the two deaths threw both the potential and the limitations of Harvard into greater relief.

The success of one first-generation student doesn’t eliminate America’s deep structural inequities, the gaps — no, gulfs — in education and opportunity along lines of class and race.

But there was also power in his pathbreaking. After graduation, he planned to work in consulting for a few years, to build a financial safety net. But then he thought he might teach — middle school, maybe, preferably in a community like the one where he grew up. He wanted to show students — low-income, first-gen, minority — that college, Harvard even, was for them.

The wallpaper on Andrew’s cellphone was a photo of his nephews in Harvard hats and T-shirts he had given them. Strangers might wonder at two young Hispanic boys from LA in Ivy League gear. To them, Andrew said, “Harvard is normal.”

For a while — even after California had gone into lockdown, even after Harvard had announced it had postponed its in-person commencement — Andrew held out hope he’d get some semblance of the celebration he’d long planned for.

When classes were called off, in March, many students took the days before move-out as an impromptu senior week, time for one last round of parties. Andrew spent a few late nights with friends, but he had thrown himself into Primus’s work, making sure first-gen and low-income students had the support they needed before they dispersed. Packing up his own life was almost an afterthought, processing it an impossibility. “I was closing a chapter on an institution that changed me,” he said, “but there was no time to stop and reflect.”

For weeks after he returned home he hoped he’d be able to reunite with a close circle of friends just before their late-May graduation; they talked of meeting in Delaware, where one lived. Finally, though, Andrew had to acknowledge the get-together wouldn’t happen.

The university announced a virtual ceremony and pledged to hold an in-person one when it was safe, with “all of the pomp, circumstance, and tradition that is typical of a Harvard commencement.” But it was hard to know when that would be. In the fall? As part of next year’s graduation? And would his family be able to attend the make-up ceremony, to take the time off work, to fly across the country?

At times he felt disappointed, at times resigned. Sometimes he looked to the bright side; the livestream meant that aunts and uncles who never could have been there in person could now watch. He even found humor in the turn of events — after all, who could have predicted that a killer virus would cancel his commencement?

“I have to remind myself,” he said, “that this is the new reality when it sometimes feels like a very weird dream.”

On May 28, graduation day, at 8 a.m. in California, the Pérezes plan to crowd around a computer to watch the virtual ceremony. Andrew’s dad asked if they could dress up and take photos. Sure, he said. His sister wants him to climb onto the roof while she shouts to all the neighbors that her brother is a Harvard grad. He’s game. In the evening, his extended family plans a drive-by parade. “I can already tell I’m going to cry as they pass by,” he said.

Sometime later Harvard will mail him his diploma. His name will be printed on it, but he knows that won’t be strictly accurate. It’s not just his; it belongs to his family, to his community. When he returns to the East Coast, to begin his new job in Boston, his diploma will probably stay in Pico Rivera, with his family.

“It’s never been just about me,” he said, “and it’s never going to be about me.”