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Joe Wills is a filmmaker and software engineer from Richford, Vermont, currently living in Burlington. He put himself through the University of Vermont, working three part-time jobs, and still graduated with more debt than any of his friends.

In this episode of "What class are you?," Joe talks with producer Erica Heilman about the challenges of higher education when you come from little money and have no college graduates in the family.

This interview was produced for the ear. We highly recommend listening to the audio. We’ve also provided a transcript, which has been edited for length and clarity.

Joe Wills: People kind of just knew that they were poor. Like, I remember, I remember people calling it "Poorford" instead of Richford.

Erica Heilman: Sorry to laugh.

Joe Wills: I remember asking my dad one time, I was like, "So, like, the richest person in Richford? Are they rich compared to, like, other people?" and he was like, "No."

Erica Heilman: What did you feel about being from a poor town? You went to this big union high school that you had to travel really far to get to. What were the class dynamics that were striking to you in high school?

Joe Wills: I mean, college kind of cast a shadow on my entire high school experience because I really wanted to go to a good college. And it was pretty apparent, if you read about all of the elite colleges, they have blogs where their students write all this fancy stuff, right? And they're all talking about how they built a supercomputer when they were 13, or a nuclear reactor in their garage, or whatever. So much of that stuff is about money.

You have to have some kind of freedom that having economic privilege gives you. If I need to go somewhere for whatever reason, like, I had to find a ride, or I needed to figure it out. I needed to work it out with my mom, right? That kind of thing seems trite. But that kind of thing can have big impacts on what you're able to do.

Like at my school, sports is also tied to class in a way in Vermont, right? Because, like, your engagement with that does rely on your ability to access transportation. All extracurriculars, all the things that you need to be able to try to reach the highest levels, right? And neither of my parents went to college. There wasn't a body of knowledge of people around me who knew how this worked.

I didn't realize until like, the fall of my senior year that some of these people have been working on this for like, a really long time. Some of these people have been paying people to help them work this stuff out. Some people have been paying people to tell them how to get good grades on like, the SATs or something like that. They know how that works.

There was a point of pride that I didn't have those resources, but I could still succeed. But the commanding theme of life when I was a kid, even though I felt like we were luckier than a lot of people around me, was struggle. People weren't theorizing about life with poverty or anything like that. It was defined by struggle. It felt like you were fighting all the time.

Erica Heilman: And there's nothing romantic about that.

Joe Wills: Right, exactly.

Erica Heilman: When you went to University of Vermont, how did class play out in college?

Joe Wills: My perception was that people like me, people who were working class, tended towards pragmatic options in terms of your program. I liked computers, but I can't say that there wasn't a part of me that was like, "Well, if I pick something else, if I pick film, I can't do that to myself. I can't shoot myself in the foot like that."

People say you go to college to discover yourself, or figure out what you want to do, right? But if you do the math for how much you pay per credit, there's no time to waste. You have to hit the ground running and you can't make one of those debilitating mistakes, right? Because if you slip below a certain GPA, I mean, if you're relying on scholarships, you slip below a certain GPA, boom. Game over. 

Erica Heilman: You're going to school with people who have more money than God, or more money than you've ever heard of. And so how did that, where did that show up during the day at college? 

Joe Wills: We were in a class about work in America. We're reading a poem by Dave Budbill, who's a Vermont poet. And it was a poem basically engaging with poverty, impoverished people, and the haves and have-nots. And it, pretty explicitly, was about skiing culture and it was about Stowe. It was this really moving poem. And I was like, I've never heard anybody talk about class. There's no poverty studies major, right?

So one of my classmates, an upper-class white woman, she took issue with the fact that Budbill used the term "native Vermonter" as in, like, "I don't think that he's indigenous" or whatever. This is someone who had, within recent memory, been discussing her parents� vineyard in Massachusetts, like on Martha's Vineyard, and it was this massive disconnect. It's like, yeah, he's talking about you. He's talking about you.

Erica Heilman: You do feel like you've achieved some upward mobility, if achieved is the right word. Is there any guilt, shame, discomfort, alienation � or is any of that relevant?

Joe Wills: I feel really lucky because I look at the lives of other people from where I'm from � I mean, I worked hard, I did. I went after opportunities. But I feel like I'm holding on really, really tight, and if I let go, then all of it's gonna go away.

Different people have handled it differently. People I know. Some people never get on that track because they see it as like, doomed to failure. They work at the pet feed factory and that's their existence.

Erica Heilman: So you're saying, if you're working at the pet feed factory, and you just never get on � is it because of the possibility of having somewhere to fall from? Is it about fear?

Joe Wills: For a lot of people, I think, it is kind of like, "They hate me so I'm just gonna ignore it," you know? Or "I'm not even gonna play the game." For other people, it's like they just can't imagine it. They don't even have the ability to see it, to see what the possibilities are, what they could achieve.