How TRIO is helping low-income and first-generation Carls defy national educational trends
Monica Law ’27 was desperate to go to college. When she was 10, her mother was diagnosed with cancer and died. When she was 16, her father passed away unexpectedly. She was a junior in high school and, suddenly, she was an orphan.
Law was an only child, born and raised in San Diego, and most of her family lived in Mexico. To stay in school, she moved in with a relative, but the situation did not work. She found herself in the house of a friend—and in desperate need of a place to live and food to eat.
A student at a predominantly Mexican American school, Law applied for the selective QuestBridge Program, an initiative to get “high-achieving students from low-income backgrounds” to the country’s top colleges and universities. To her surprise, she was matched with Carleton and received a full scholarship.
But Law understood that she would need more than that to support her college journey. She knew that there would be holes in her education and that a full scholarship would not pay for the books she’d need in her classes. She didn’t know where the additional support would come from.
TRIO/Student Support Services first entered Law’s life through the mail, as a pamphlet inviting her to apply for a program that has been at Carleton since 1981. TRIO began as a federally funded initiative born from President Lyndon B. Johnson’s “War on Poverty,” its name recognizing the first three programs created following the passage of the Higher Education Act of 1965: Upward Bound, Talent Search, and Student Support Services. To participate, students must be “U.S. citizens, permanent residents, or refugees pursuing their first bachelor’s degree” and “be low-income as determined by federal guidelines,” “be first-generation college students,” or “have a documented disability.” Law qualified, although not everyone who does can be served. In 2023–24, there were 75 applicants at Carleton and only 35 spaces in the program.
As part of the application process, Law had to do a virtual interview. “It was nerve-wracking,” and she left the conversation feeling “like I had no chance.”
On the other end of the call, Kim Hildahl, the director of TRIO at Carleton, felt differently. She knew that students like Law were exactly the reason why the program exists.
Recognizing First-Generation and Low-Income Students
Although she came from a different background, Hildahl understood that Law would encounter some of the same challenges she had as a white student from a low-income family. Hildahl was the first in her family to go to college, and she struggled at the University of Texas at Austin. She found that she had not been prepared with the skills and habits she needed to excel in the classroom. Among them, where and how to ask for help. Hildahl confided what she believed was her failure to a friend, a student at St. Olaf College. The possibility of a fresh start compelled Hildahl to transfer north. Hildahl eventually graduated from St. Olaf and became a teacher, then found work with Upward Bound, her introduction to the TRIO programs. From her own experiences, Hildahl knew that TRIO could help Law engage with the social, cultural, financial, personal, and academic obstacles at Carleton.
When Law discovered that she’d been accepted into TRIO and that the program had a lending library where she could get the required textbooks for her classes, the feasibility of a Carleton education became clearer. Last fall, while many members of the incoming class were dropped off by family, Law arrived on campus with her best friend’s mother, who flew to Minnesota with her so she could start her first year of college.
Like Law, Kevin Tran ’25 came to Carleton without visiting first. A first-generation college student from Houston’s Vietnamese American diaspora, he arrived as part of a cohort of 10, thanks to the Posse Foundation, a support program “rooted in the belief that a small, diverse group of talented students—a Posse—carefully selected and trained, can serve as a catalyst for individual and community development.” Tran noticed immediately that there was an overlap: many of his Posse friends also qualified for TRIO.
At the TRIO house, the headquarters for the program with common areas for programming and student use, Tran found “a community for first-generation students who might need a helping hand and guidance through college.” He says, “I feel appreciated and welcomed even though I don’t fall into the typical college student profile.”
Tran and Law, like other first-generation and low-income students at Carleton, are making a decision that defies national trends. According to the U.S. Education Department’s National Center for Education Statistics, a person’s parental education level affects their choice of college. Nearly half of all first-generation students who enroll in postsecondary education choose a public two-year college. Only seven percent choose to attend a private college. They know they are a small sector of the Carleton student body and that, nationally, many first-generation and low-income students do not graduate from college in four years. In fact, one-third of first-generation students drop out after three years, compared to 14 percent of their peers whose parents have earned a degree. Tran and Law and their TRIO-eligible peers understand that the numbers are not in their favor.
A Personal Perspective
Some 20 years ago, I was a TRIO student and peer leader. Then, the office was in the basement of Scoville; the lending library was in the attic. I watched as Denise Myers and then Rietta Turner, directors of the program in those years, added and subtracted numbers, read and reviewed pages and pages of grant application printouts. I sat with fellow students as we created programming that could address class consciousness at Carleton. We dreamed up conversations that might help us feel more visible on campus. We facilitated workshops around money management and talked about the intersectional realities of TRIO students.
What we didn’t talk about: how hard it was to have twenty dollars in your pocket, to know that the 20 dollars had to last the whole term, how embarrassing it was to be present when our peers were chipping in money to buy late night pizza and coffee at Blue Monday. We didn’t talk about how at home our family members needed therapy but health insurance didn’t cover such services or how our father’s Type 2 diabetes medication cut into the family’s food budget.
We were trying to raise our voices, to cultivate a confidence that we did not feel, to do our part in bringing our particular challenges to the awareness of a college campus that, mostly white and wealthy at that time, represented worlds we had never known intimately.
One TRIO student in our group, a genius, smelled of pigs. He did not live far from Northfield but was the first in his family to enter Carleton’s campus. His glasses were thick, and he spoke slowly and matter-of-factly at TRIO meetings about his life as a farmer’s kid. He had a habit of squeezing his hands on his lap as he spoke, knuckles red across the seasons.
There was another student from the South who sang beautifully, her voice lilting and sweet, and dressed like a professional although we were students and still far from that possibility. She wore belts at her waist and boots that reached above her knees. She had a big smile, and when she laughed the corners of her eyes crinkled up. She came from a single-parent household and carried the dreams of countless generations of women.
There was yet another student who did not live on campus at all. She’d gotten permission to live in an apartment so she could work at McDonald’s, in addition to her work-study hours, so she could support herself and any younger sibling who needed assistance. She was the oldest of a large family, a refugee kid trying to balance the responsibilities of home and college in her shiny leather jacket.
There weren’t many of us, but we were on campus, and we met each other in the basement of Scoville, along with students from what was then called the Multicultural and LGBTQ Offices. We’d meet in the eaves of the lending library at the beginning and end of each term, first when the students came with a list of classes and required texts and then again to return the books we’d borrowed. In the dining halls, we sometimes said hello and other times looked away from each other, aware that our stories converged in an uncomfortable place far from privilege, playing out the tenuous identities that we had forged in the hopes of surviving and thriving here, and whatever future lay beyond college.
One thing was certain: when we graduated, if we graduated (nationally, only between seven and 11 percent of low-income and first-generation college students earn a bachelor’s degree within six years), many of us would be returning to the places we came from—with their limits, their impossibilities and insecurities, all amplified by the consequences of the -isms we studied in Carleton’s classrooms. No future was guaranteed, and we were all keenly aware that ours remained precariously hopeful at best.
Only between seven and 11 percent of low-income and first-generation college students earn a bachelor’s degree within six years.
Yet for those of us who did graduate, TRIO taught us something important about class. With the TRIO programI went to Forepaugh’s Restaurant for the first time, a fancy French restaurant in St. Paul with shiny silverware and soft seats, and I noticed how other diners kept their napkins on their laps while they were eating, just like in the movies. With TRIO I was able to visit graduate schools on the East Coast, and though I didn’t end up going to the University of Virginia or Georgetown, I headed east anyway for my graduate degree, now with an idea of what life was like there. TRIO had shown me, on an institutional level, that class was a construction of money and power and that it need not intimidate me, or worse yet, sentence me away from or to the communities, circumstances, and conditions of my birth.
Continuing the Work
When people ask me about my experience at Carleton, I cannot speak of it without talking about the impact of the TRIO program, the mentors I found in its fold, and the friends I’ve made. Of the many reasons I’m proud of Carleton, none makes me stand taller than the fact that it’s one of the only colleges of its tier with a TRIO program, that the College has continued its commitment to the mission and work of this initiative to respond to and recognize on its campus the injustices of our world, the fact that life as a college student is inexorably hard for first-generation and low-income families, that we need institutional support in order to facilitate our possibilities.
Twenty-one years after I first encountered TRIO, today’s students are enjoying services similar to the ones that allowed my success at Carleton. On a recent campus visit, a bus was about to take students to the Minneapolis Indigenous restaurant Owamni, winner of the James Beard Foundation’s Best New Restaurant award in 2022. The students had an opportunity to go to Washington, D.C. to learn about advocacy and to visit graduate schools in New York City. In speaking with them, it is clear to me that TRIO is as essential as it has ever been.
“Carleton finally feels like home because TRIO was my home. Through TRIO, I understand that Carleton has my back.”
Monica Law struggled after arriving at Carleton. “I had never seen this many white people. In my first term, I generally didn’t know what I was doing. I was more aware of my aloneness than I had ever been. I missed being in my community.” But by the end of her third term, “Carleton finally feels like home because TRIO was my home,” Law says. “Through TRIO, I understand that Carleton has my back.”
Tran says being part of the TRIO program has given him “a level of validity” and a community that “understands each other’s stories and resources and the fact that not all the students begin with the same level of stability.” The program’s existence and work are an effort to “even the playing field,” he adds.
Across the country, there are 202,000 students being served by 1,069 Student Support Services programs at some 200 colleges. At a 2023 TRIO conference in San Diego, each institutional representative was asked to stand up in accordance with their graduation rates for first-generation and low-income college students. Kim Hildahl was the last director to rise because Carleton TRIO’s target graduation rate for first-generation and low-income students is among the highest in the nation at 90 percent.
Into the Future
For many of us, it is in Carleton’s classrooms that we learn about the source of so many of our misfortunes, the historical and circumstantial injustices that are enacted against the poor and uneducated, our families and communities. Even as we strive to succeed in college, we must reckon with the fact that in our country there are powerful people who do not want us to be present, individuals who have created industries to exploit and ensure that generations of our people remain impoverished. We must contend with the fact that institutions of higher learning, even Carleton, were not made with us in mind. Many first-generation and low-income students drown in this knowledge, and without the arms of individuals that work in offices like TRIO—many of us cannot surface, do not have the opportunity to learn how to tread the currents of injustice, to float in the waters of privilege, and to swim to the distant shores of our futures.
After her first year, Law is more determined than ever to succeed at Carleton. She recently took part in a six-week summer enrichment program at the University of California–Los Angeles, a program that she learned about from her TRIO mentor, one that paid for room and board and granted her a stipend so that she could focus on academic proficiency and career development, even explore the city.
Beneath a hot sun, Law reflects on her first year at Carleton, “With the year officially behind me, I can see how hard college is. My first year was very rough, and honestly, I am not very proud of how I handled a lot of the challenges that were thrown at me. But I understand that I did the best I could at the time,” she says. “I was not sure what I was going to do or how long it would take for me to break and drop out. But now I know I will be okay.”
Law says she has grown considerably. “I learned. I made better choices and made really good friends in chemistry who have helped me in my journey. While they are all doing better than me, they have never judged me, and they encouraged me to keep trying. I am still not good at chemistry, but that does not mean that in the future I will still be bad.”
She is optimistic about the new school year. “I’m honestly excited,” Law says. “I’m going to be a New Student Week leader for the incoming class, and I hope to be a mentor. I want to tell them that you might fail, you may not. But regardless, you will be okay. I see that I am not alone despite my parents not being here. TRIO and my friends are my family, and they celebrate and cheer for me. They evoke feelings that I had not felt for a long time since my parents passed away.”