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message received 75 both of Kathy’s parents spent their lives working in a Midwestern factory similar to General Motors (they worked in Indiana). When Kathy was 13 years old, her dad disappeared, effectively creating a single-parent family led by her mother. Kathy finished high school in Indiana; married a man enlisted in the U.S. Army; and, after a divorce, moved to Los Angeles to find economic opportunity and better schooling for her two daughters. Kathy worked as an administrative assistant in the counseling center for Airport High School, the school that her 11th-grade daughter attended. While never a college student herself, as a parent she was not a novice to the college-choice process. Her second daughter was an alumna of a his- torically Black college. Invoking a Negative Educational Role Model: Parents Say “Don’t Be Like Me!” As noted by many scholars, the parents of African American and other racial and ethnic minorities who have no college experience believe that education can open doors for their children that were closed for them. As a result, they do everything they can to make this possible, up to and often including participation in their child’s education (Chavkin, 1989; Chavkin & Williams, 1993; Freeman, 2005). This was the experience of the Three, who shared their stories about their parents’ attitudes toward the value of education expressed to them while they were K–12 students. In working poor or poverty-stricken communities, the norms for educational aspirations are centered on earning a high school degree. As children, the Three were exposed to ideas about education that were consistent with the poverty-stricken, predominantly Black communities where they resided. That a high school diploma was seen as the best preparation for living-wage careers was explained by one of the three women, who said that such values were “just the generation I grew up in; I think all the neighborhoods felt the same way back then.” That single mother was Lena who is currently an administrative assistant in the field of business office maintenance after finishing high school and enrolling in college, even though she did not receive a degree. Prior to this work she was an administrative assistant in the insurance field. Lena’s parents required that she and her siblings obtain the level of education sufficient to earn wages that would make it possible to maintain a living wage and raise a family. She cites her dad as being particularly supportive of his children’s educational endeavors: