Author Stephanie Land brought her dad a college information packet when she was a junior in high school.
The former Washington resident said she hoped he would be excited or proud that she wanted to apply. Instead, he responded with a question she could not answer: “How are you going to pay for that?”
Land spent the rest of high school listening to classmates discuss college tours, applications and “safety schools.”
“I never asked how they were going to pay for that, but I wanted to,” she said. “Because up until that conversation with my dad, I hadn’t wondered how other people could afford to send their kids to college.”
On Tuesday, Land told an audience that story at Western Washington University, one of those institutions that felt so out of reach to her as a teenager. Her speech was the main event of the college’s Hunger and Homelessness Awareness week, with ticket sales benefiting Western’s food pantry and the Western Success Scholars program.
Land chronicled her university experience in her 2023 memoir “Class,” the follow-up to her bestseller “Maid” about life as a single mother cleaning affluent clients’ homes for a living. Her debut made former President Barack Obama’s summer reading list in 2019 and spawned a popular Netflix series of the same name.
During her talk, Land recounted a path to a college degree marked by years of struggle and sacrifice — a tightrope balancing classes with supporting herself and her daughter, student loans that pushed her deeper into poverty and a persistent sense that her job as a house cleaner was “more valuable to society” than academics.
“Every aspect of higher education felt like a particularly cruel game,” she said, “or like I was really getting an advanced degree in irony.”
Land eventually graduated from the University of Montana with an English degree. A personal essay turned into a book deal when it went viral, and then the book was a hit.
Success was gratifying, but disorienting too. Suddenly, Land found herself in the same social class as her one-time clients.
At book tour stops, audience members asked Land why “someone like me had to clean houses for a living.” She has no doubt, she said, that people paid more attention to her story because of her race (white), her bachelor’s degree and her middle-class background.
“I am very conscious that my story is a palatable kind of poor person story,” she said.
For the college students in the audience at Western, Land offered advice: take advantage of office hours, a resource she did not learn about until after graduation. Understand that “you, sitting in your seat, are already an expert and that expertise has value.” And recognize the expertise of the person beside you.
“You are entitled to an education, no matter what your background is or how you got yourself to the point of sitting in that chair,” she said. “You deserve to be here.”
Sophia Gates covers rural Whatcom and Skagit counties. She is a Washington State Murrow Fellow whose work is underwritten by taxpayers and available outside CDN's paywall. Reach her at sophiagates@cascadiadaily.com; 360-922-3090 ext. 131.
