Ray Suarez, whom many people know as the serious and dedicated correspondent for PBS, was the first in his family to go to college, and it changed everything for him. “It is a shame that college has become so pivotal in the U.S.

But if your idea about American life is to move your family up, then college is a requirement for that upward social mobility" Ray says. That’s what his parents saw clearly, and what he has passed on to his own children.

Family Background: His father was born in Puerto Rico, joined the Navy without a high school diploma and then got his GED in the Navy. His mother, born in the U.S., went to secretarial training in high school. “I give my parents a great deal of credit; they always had the idea that I would get a good education. They would push and push and push and do everything necessary to make sure that happened. It certainly helped that I liked school and was good at school, but my parents made sure I was doing the things necessary to go on to college.” And his parents even moved, "from a neighborhood that was brown to on that was not to get me into the right elementary school."

Pre College Education: PS 281 Junior High, John Dewey High School (Brooklyn, NY).

College Education: BA Degree in African History from NYU 1978

"Aha" Moment: “The transformative experience for me was to go to a high school where college was assumed. I came to a place of entitlement, in the best sense of that, where kids knew that they would be going to college from the first day they drew breath, where they accepted it as a birthright. They had social capital. And then I realized that they were not smarter than me, there was no alchemy or magic involved. I would have to work harder and to work during vacations while they went off to ski. But I could go to college too.”

On Mentors: “The only people I knew growing up who had a college degree were my priest, my teachers and my doctors….I didn’t have one mentor. After a point, I just knew I would be going on.”

Making a Way for His Own Children“We started talking about college early, and they have a mother and father with post graduate degrees.. . .There was a psychic space on the second floor hallway where we hung all the degrees—their mother’s bachelor and master’s degrees, their father’s bachelors and masters and honorary doctorate degrees. So they never had any doubt about whether they would go to college. And we made a deal: if they work hard and do well, they could go to any college on planet earth.” His son is now a student at the University of Chicago, and his daughter is a student at Columbia.

Education as the Route to Social & Economic Mobility: “My mother and father could see the importance of education, and we went in two generations from awful, frightening, grinding poverty in Puerto Rico to the Ivy Leagues —with just me in the middle.”

Suarez acknowledges that along with the positive social mobility, there will also be differences between generations: “There will be some cultural and social differences between parents and children (who are educated when the parents are not). They are not going to think the same anymore, or perhaps will not have the same beliefs anymore….Your kids join a new class where you are not a member, and have new ways of interacting with people. You may not be able to advise them on everything, because you have never had anything like those experiences.”