Inside the World of First Generation College Students
By Sara Ann Knutson | October 8, 2017
Berkeley, California
Cody Coleman grew up in a suburb of New Jersey, raised by his maternal grandparents. His mother had given birth to him from prison, and over the course of 21 years, the household racked up 61 police reports. Cody embraced his hours at school as moments of reprieve from his chaotic living environment. He knew that an education offered an opportunity to get out. But his high school guidance counselors were oversubscribed and he had low expectations for attending a good university. His grandfather, after all, had only a second-grade education. Finding support from his older brother, coworkers, and trigonometry teacher, Cody became the first student in his high school to attend MIT.
Cody’s story highlights one of the diverse experiences of first-generation college students across the United States. The representation of this group on college campuses raises pressing questions of how to best support students hailing from range of social backgrounds.
In 2015, approximately 1.4 million undergraduates attending four-year public and private universities were first-generation students, about 20 percent of undergraduates in the U.S. The Ivy League tends to trail behind this national average. In 2016, 11 percent of admits to Brown University’s Class of 2020 were first-generation students.
The systematic structures that prevent many underrepresented students from seeking admission to top undergraduate programs, however, are by no means restricted to elite institutions. A study from The New York Times revealed that no less than 38 colleges admit more students with family income earnings of over $630,000 than students whose families earn less than $65,000. To alleviate such inequalities, the University of Michigan proposed in June 2017 to offer free tuition to students in this lower income bracket.
The reality, of course, is more complicated than simply an issue of socioeconomic status. Misconceptions about the social backgrounds of first-generation students are propagated across academe. “People assume that I come from a low-income background, because I was raised by a single parent and am a first-gen student,” remarks Nathan Carillo, a recent graduate of the University of Michigan. “But my grandmother held a master’s degree in education. This is the loophole of the ‘first-gen’ identity.”
The first-gen identity indeed cuts across all sections of socioeconomic statuses, race, and gender. Simplifying “first-gen” to a label synonymous with “low-income” has created frustrations for some first-generation students across socioeconomic statuses. In an interview with The Chronicle of Higher Education, Dr. Sonja Ardoin emphasized the intersectionality of first-generation student demographics, including but not limited to low-income backgrounds.
Many first-generation students feel that this nuance to their identity is important. “When people hear ‘first-gen student’, they need to first assume ‘diligent worker,’ not ‘low-income,’” Nathan Carillo asserts.
“First-generation student” is certainly an ambiguous term fraught with controversy. It may refer to people whose parents attended some college but did not complete a degree or program. In other cases, the label is restricted to those whose families have no college experience at all. But either way, the students who fit these definitions may not even be aware of their identity. Cody Coleman had no conception of what a first-generation student was until he attended MIT’s first-gen faculty panels. Ignorance, he admits, is sometimes bliss. “If you don’t know you are disadvantaged, you just go for it.” By the time he realized he was a first-generation student, he had already established himself at MIT.
Sarah Eriksen, an alumna of UC Berkeley, agrees. “I had no idea that Berkeley was a good school, it was just near my family. I don’t think I would have applied had I known how prestigious it is.” Sarah explains that she never considered her parents to be uneducated simply because they did not hold degrees. “They had insane educations in other ways, through work and life experiences that were formative to my own upbringing. And yet, people would assume that your parents were dumb if they hadn’t attended college.”
Contrary to popular conceptions that first-gen students always lack family support, the life experiences of parents oftentimes instill an intrinsic drive to attend college. “My mom couldn’t help with my assignments but I had a great advantage in that I could ask her for professional advice,” says Nathan. His first-gen student identity was entangled in positive messages of self-sufficiency but it was nevertheless secondary to other identities that held greater personal weight, including being a part of the LGBTQ community.
The multiplicity of personal identities among first-generation students is an important issue. A first-generation American and the first in her family to earn a B.A., Sarah explains that she had a nebulous sense of identity growing up because her parents had several. “Both my parents are from Europe, my mother was a refugee. My parents didn’t identify with a specific profession, because they held multiple. This was a foreign concept for my college friends and I found it unpleasant when asked to identify my parents’ professions in social situations.”
For other students, ‘first-gen’ is a welcomed label. A graduate of the University of Michigan, Vanessa Davis* explains that she understood her first-generation identity through an intersectional lens. “It is a label that helps me sort through some of the complexities of being a white woman from a working class family.”
Many first-generation students feel that their identity becomes particularly salient during the college application process, an area of unchartered waters. “It is not a process that has been designed for students to do on their own,” claims Melia Metaxa*, a first-generation American and graduate of Brown University. “It is an overwhelming process for everyone. But the college application process entrenches many inequalities — it’s important to be aware of that.”
Students whose parents are unfamiliar with the college application process must find alternative resources, from teachers and counselors to the older siblings of friends, community centers, educational programs, and fee waivers. The fundamental problem for the first-gen student, however, is realizing that such resources exist.
“Being a first-generation student is like running up a sandy slope while your privileged peers are climbing stairs,” says Mariana Perez*, a junior at the Ohio State University. “It is not enough to work hard in school. We have to teach ourselves the unspoken procedures that others readily have access to.”
And yet most first-gens seem to agree that the difficulties of the application process produce a sense of solidarity. Cody explains, “we have to figure it all out on our own. It is a self-driven process that consists of Googling information and looking up Collegeboard©.” Vanessa similarly completed applications on her own because her parents believed that a four-year university would be too expensive and that she should first attend community college. “I was determined to show them that academically I could go straight to a four-year with enough financial support. My parents were absolutely out of their comfort zones. This was a process I had to figure out and fumble with on my own.”
Unlike his peers whose parents were familiar with the college experience, Nathan had not been exposed to the landscape of “campus cultures” that demands extensive time and money for college visits. He regrets that he did not realize that college applications consider other factors beyond grades and test scores, but in fact require students to demonstrate how their personal and academic goals align with the culture of the university — commonly described as a student’s “fit.”
Recent efforts are combating the advantages that first-generation students are often not privy to. This year, the intra-institutional “No Apologies” Initiative was established to waive application fees for first-generation and low-income students. Many degree-granting institutions are also hiring first-generation student administrators, establishing mentoring programs, and targeting socioeconomic diversity in the classroom. In 2016, Brown University established the “First-Generation College and Low-Income Student Center,” dedicated to providing resources to students whose parents did not complete a four-year degree.
But will this type of institutional support be enough for students struggling to overcome the barriers that quite often prevent others in their position from obtaining higher education? That may largely depend on how resources are used and targeted.
Addressing, for instance, what has been termed the “hidden curriculum” remains a key issue. The hidden curriculum includes experiential learning activities that occur outside the classroom and are increasingly essential to a college education: study abroad, work internships, service learning, fieldwork, research assistantships, and faculty-student collaborations. These opportunities, correlated with retention rates, academic success, and student engagement, are not always readily communicated, especially to disadvantaged students who may not understand their importance or realize their availability. First-generation students find the hidden curriculum incredibly difficult to navigate. Last year, the National Survey of Student Engagement (Nessie) discovered that 68 percent of non-first generation students participated in two high-impact activities before graduation, while only 55 percent of first-generation students did.
“It’s of the greatest challenges of being a first-generation student,” reminds Cody. “You don’t know what you don’t know.” This feeling of alienation creates social and emotional challenges throughout undergrad. Sarah had little idea how to seek out opportunities on campus or how to communicate just how little she knew. “I assumed my peers and I were going through the challenges of college together and it never really was the case, not in the same way.” Sarah’s professors assumed that, as a UC Berkeley student, she had “basic knowledge” that she did not always have — what was the difference between a fellowship, grant, and stipend, and how do they limit or impact each other? Many first-generation students reported that advisers often blew off such questions or failed to respond in a helpful way.
The assumptions that are readily made about students on college campuses, unfortunately, do not end in interactions with peers, faculty, and advisers, but extend into university administrations. During her sophomore year, Vanessa received notice of a grave error in her FAFSA form and it could not be processed for financial aid. The error was that Vanessa’s family household income had dropped and the federal government believed she was hiding funds in order to receive more financial aid. “I had to write letters to verify the already heart-wrenching fact that my father had been laid off and my mother quit her job for mental health reasons, that both were receiving unemployment checks and actively looking for work. It was humiliating to have to prove my family’s financial situation.”
One of the ultimate challenges for first-generation students is incredibly personal: managing to keep face and focus in school while your family situation back home exerts its own emotional toil. Cody discloses how difficult it is “when you have all this extra weight on you from the craziness in your life from back home. It was hard to explain my Spring Break plans to friends, why I was staying with my trigonometry teacher when my mother was arrested. It was all too much to keep explaining the situation to everyone.” Cody refers to these personal matters as his “other life” while externally he tried to maintain a studious presence at school. “Everyone was flabbergasted when I finally told them my story. They had assumed that I was a ‘preppy.’”
Vanessa’s “other life” appeared when she learned that her mother had stage IV cancer. “I remember countless nights thinking that she would never live to see me graduate, that I would never be able to graduate because I would be expected to quit school to go home and work and help take care of the family.” Vanessa’s concerns emphasize the immediacy placed on disadvantaged students. She explains, “There are a lot of extra stressors that my peers didn’t have to deal with. Even students whose families faced health challenges never seemed to think that a family member’s medical problems could influence their ability to stay in school.”
The experiences of first-generation students demand us to explore the fundamental societal, cultural, and economic structures that hinder people from accessing an education. Students from disadvantaged backgrounds tend to face an exposure issue: many are never exposed to higher-income professions. “From software engineers and doctors to biologists and journalists — these students rarely see such people walking around their neighborhood, ” says Cody. “Ultimately, the college experience should make up for this fact, and allow students to make informed decisions about what they want to do with their life.”
Opportunities for personal growth and learning, navigating interactions with diverse groups of people, and social equality are the hallmarks of higher education today. As such, we need to rethink how to achieve these goals through greater institutional and informal support, both during the college admissions process and throughout students’ college careers. The number of students who manage to break through the systematic biases — 1 out of every 5 students on American campuses — is an encouraging start.
Education, it is clear, contains great social capital. Many of us in academia are wholly unprepared to confront exactly how much an undergraduate degree is a marker of social prestige and privilege. Theodor Adorno critiqued academe’s control of educational opportunity in Prisms (1967). He wrote that we live “in a world which denies the mass of human beings the authentic experience of intellectual phenomena by making genuine education a privilege.” Fifty years later, Adorno’s words still resonate.
* Name has been changed.
Originally published at saraannknutson.com on October 6, 2017.
