Yes, I remember my own far off imaginings of the romantic liberal arts higher education experience. I dreamed up lecture rooms full of students who looked nothing like me, chock- full of cultural capital as they were, being rhapsodized by brilliant, sage professors who read Baudelaire on the quad between classes.

I showed up on my college campuses – a first generation Mexican girl from the Texas-Mexico border – believing I had I so much to figure out. Thinking I had to write down everything, observe everything, decipher everything – lest I fall behind.

Gosh. If someone had just told me that by growing up poor I had exactly what I needed to figure my way through college, I could have enjoyed the experience so much more. If someone had asked me what I brought to the table – the skills I gained by figuring my way through poverty, domestic violence, a broken home – I would have established myself as a success from the gate. I had, in fact, survived 100% of what life had thrown at me; I just didn’t know that at the time.

But we can remind our students of this. We can flip the script on them, demystify the higher education experience, make it attainable. We can recognize and celebrate the skills and life experiences they bring to college. Beyond that, we can teach them to adapt that grit to their college careers and help them see that the work – though it is different from what they might have known – still boils down to putting one determined foot in front of the other and making forward progress.

If what we are reading in the research regarding food insecurity, homelessness, and at-risk status among community college students is correct, we can expect that more and more of them will arrive on our campuses with what I call “bonus” skills. These are students who have to drop off siblings and parents at school and work before they drive the only car in the household to college. These are students who will leave class early to take a grandparent to a doctor’s appointment or rush to a school conference for their own children and then rush back to class on a near-empty tank of gas. They will be hungry, and they will be tired, and they will be stretched to their internal capacities before we even ask them to submit a single assignment for the week.

But if we take a moment to acknowledge them, to inquire about them, to celebrate them for applying their survival skills to college, we can perhaps redirect their attention to the idea that their sometimes difficult experiences boil down to exactly what they need to graduate from college – grit.