"Friends of mine complain they're too busy," says 30-year-old Nicole Avist, steering her '95 Honda Accord through the streets of San Francisco's Ingleside neighborhood. "I tell them, 'But you only had to dress yourself today.' " It's just past 8 on an early spring morning, and Avist, a social work major at San Francisco State University, has already fixed breakfast for her two young daughters and dropped them off at elementary school. As she drives home, where she'll park the car and catch a bus to the university, she phones a girlfriend to talk up a Saturday bus trip to a northern California Indian casino. "I need to make sure," Avist says, hanging up, "that I balance myself out."

A single mom, a student, and a part-time worker, Avist has developed a tightrope walker's sense of balance. She attends class three days a week, works 15 hours per week at a campus office that assists students who are also parents, and returns home each evening to help her girls with their homework before starting on her own. A second, temporary job as a receptionist at H&R Block wound down at the end of tax season, and Avist is on the lookout for another. She wasn't always so motivated: After high school, she attended the City College of San Francisco for a single semester before taking a data entry job. But Avist says her two daughters have turned her into a role model–she makes a point of bringing her children to class each year during their spring break. "I want school to be natural for them, so it's not even a question," she says, leaving an hourlong morning shift at her campus job for a 10 o'clock lecture. "It wasn't really natural for me."

Making time. Like Avist, many of San Francisco State's nearly 21,000 undergrads have never taken college for granted. A full 93 percent of the university's students live off campus; for many, their classes are a commute away from a deluge of real-world responsibilities that includes raising kids, supporting parents, and working overtime. "At other schools, I get the impression that students have a lot of time to kill," says Josh Scott, a 23-year-old English major who attends San Francisco State with his wife, Hope. "Here, students are constantly trying to make time." And SF State students are more like the typical American undergrad than, say, their counterparts at elite, high-priced residential colleges. After all, 2 in 3 students at four-year schools attend public institutions. More than half go to college less than 25 miles from where they went to high school (which means they're likely commuting from home), and nearly 40 percent are older than 24.

For Josh, who works 25 hours a week as an instructional assistant at Diablo Valley community college in the East Bay, the two-hour rail commute to and from school provides valuable study time. The Scotts would prefer a shorter ride to school, but San Francisco rents can't compete with their $700-per-month apartment in Benicia, 37 miles north of the city. "I've learned more about life than you would by just rolling out of bed and going to class," Josh says on the train ride home, weighing the benefits of an off-campus address. Hope, sitting next to him, agrees, citing an internship for which she counsels students at a Bay Area high school for four hours a week: "We're not just stuck in a bubble."

While SF State encourages service learning (some departments give students credit for volunteer work related to their majors), most students are more apt to be pitching in at home. Senior Luis Godinez, a broadcast major, chose to attend SF State so he could live at home in Hayward (a 45-minute drive from campus) and ease his parents' financial burden. "I know how hard they worked to get us here," Godinez says of his mom and dad, who arrived in the Bay Area from Mexico in the early 1990s. "I wanted to give back to them." Because Godinez qualified for a full-ride financial aid package (had he not, tuition is $1,002 per semester for in-staters), he saw SF State not as one of many options but as the only sure route to a bachelor's degree.

Godinez is the first member of his family to attend college, but that hardly makes him a standout here. Just over half of the university's students speak English as a second language, and the campus is among the most diverse in the country. Asian-Americans make up nearly a third of the student population (as do whites); Filipinos, whom the campus counts separately from other Asians, represent an additional 12 percent; and African-Americans, Mexican-Americans, and non-Mexican Latinos each constitute roughly 7 percent. Immigrants and first-generation Americans at SF State tend to see school as a means of advancing themselves and their families rather than as a place to find themselves or forge lifelong friendships. "I'm not here to fool around," says Tara Binsaree, a freshman whose family immigrated from Thailand, sitting with friends at a table in the student center's dining hall. "I can't understand why people would go to college to party and drink."

The first in her family to go to college, Binsaree says she feels intense pressure to succeed. But as the sole driver in a household that includes extended family, she spends much of her time ferrying relatives between home, work, and school–on top of preparing meals and helping siblings and cousins with schoolwork. "I feel like I'm leading a double life," says Nathaniel Francisco, a Filipino-born freshman who lives with his parents and five brothers and sisters in Oakley, a small town about 55 miles from San Francisco. "School hardly plays into any of my conversations at home." Francisco's public transit commute to San Francisco State: three hours each way, three days a week.

Lengthy commutes and hectic student schedules take a heavy toll on campus life. Despite its huge student body, the university's brilliant-green quad, shadowed by a stand of tall Monterey pines, is often bare, save for the students crisscrossing the cement pathways en route to class. Tight-knit social circles can be hard to come by. "I'll get a number from someone in class so I can call for homework if I'm sick, but that's about it," says Hope Scott, who is majoring in liberal studies. "My feeling toward school kind of resembles a business relationship."

Even campus social events can be lonely affairs. At a recent SF State baseball game, the bleachers hosted more fans for the visiting California Polytechnic State University-Pomona Broncos (whose school is a six-hour drive from San Francisco) than for the home team. "When I tell people there's a volleyball team here, they usually say, 'Really?' " says Tessa Hedstrom, a senior who came to SF State on a volleyball scholarship. Engineering major Nelly Lau, who recently started an engineering honors society on campus, says that just four of seven new members showed up at a recent induction dinner.

Off campus. Students are often loath to make plans with one another after trekking home for the weekend, confining many friendships to classrooms and dining halls. Mary Sue Woodbury, a 21-year-old broadcast major, met her boyfriend and most of her close friends off campus, while working San Francisco's open-mike standup comedy circuit. She says that maintaining friendships with classmates after they graduate is nearly impossible, since there's been little socializing off campus. When Woodbury showed up at a Saturday night house party in late April, a friend who recently graduated from SF State answered the door and gasped, "I haven't seen you since . . . December!"

That's not to say that SF Staters are reclusive. While memberships at student organizations may not be booming, big families and close-knit neighborhoods serve as bases for active social lives. Twenty-five-year-old Eric Manuel, for instance, has never joined a campus club but spends much of his free time entering martial arts tournaments through his neighborhood gym. Manuel found his roommate through his brother; a frequent lunch partner, Valerie, met him through a cousin who knows Manuel from class. "People here hang out with who they grew up with," he says. At the student center's food court, tables are filled with students who know each other from high school or through family relations, further blurring the lines between campus and the outside world.

Indeed, SF State's acute awareness of the outside world's practical challenges makes it more of a career training center than an intellectual powerhouse. Cal State schools (which include SF State) represent the second tier of California's public higher-education system, targeting high schoolers with B averages or better. "I saw a lot more people studying at Cal Poly," says Rosemary Villagomez, 24, who attended California Polytechnic State University San Luis Obispo for a year before transferring to SF State. "They were being supported by their parents, so they could put all their energies into their studies." Many students here put less stock in making the dean's list than in landing a good job. Marlon Hom, chair of SF State's Asian American Studies Department, recalls that when he taught at the University of California-Los Angeles earlier in his career, "I used to give students A's, and they'd come back and argue for A pluses." Not here. " It's not that the students aren't driven," he continues. "It's that they have lives."