The literature on first-generation college students includes a rich collection of edited books in which academics and other professionals from poor and working-class backgrounds write about becoming educated.
The earliest of these books drew together authors from across academic disciplines. The narratives in these volumes are commonly framed within critical perspectives from their fields: sociology, history, critical race theory, gender studies, critical literary studies, and/or critical studies in education. Social class inequalities (before, during, and after college) are centered in these volumes, and each challenges the notion that individual mobility is the solution for structural class inequalities. Authors write of family members' exploitation in the workplace, pervasive classism in college and graduate school, the invisibility of people like them in the curriculum and in the life experiences of peers and faculty. The chapters are often tinged with anger.
My personal and intellectual understanding of being "first-gen" was deepened by Ryan and Sackrey’s Strangers in Paradise: Academics from the Working Class, and Dews and Law's This Fine Place So Far From Home: Voices of Academics from the Working Class. The feminist critiques within Tokarczyk and Fay's Working Class Women in the Academy: Laborers in the Knowledge Factory and Welsch's Those Winter Sundays: Female Academics and Their Working-Class Parents explored the work of becoming educated after generations of women were denied their place in college and the intertwined barriers of gender and class in the academy.
I happened upon British scholars Mahony and Zmroczek's collection Class Matters: 'Working-Class' Women's Persectives on Social Class while waiting for a meeting in the library, and while each of the chapters wove sociological critique of schooling with feminist critique of sociological theory, Diane Reay's chapter led me to her career-long sharp analysis, righteous anger, and insistence on probing the complex psycho-social processes of social mobility through education, especially for women.
Across all of these interdisciplinary books are core themes: class as a collective identity, family histories of class oppression as context for becoming educated, and pervasive critique of the marginalization of poor and working-class students in the academy and workplace. The chapters are case studies of the need for institutional and social change.
More recently, scholars and staff within the field of Student Affairs have also begun editing volumes of essays of professionals who were first-generation students, with a more explicit aim of guiding and inspiring current students while informing the delivery of direct services to students on campus. While the books do include some chapters from authors from other disciplines, the perspectives of the authors in these volumes are overwhelmingly shaped within the counseling/individual support frameworks of the professional fields of Higher Education/Student Affairs. Most of the authors (though some of these books also include chapters authored by students) have advanced degrees in Higher Education Administration, Student Personnel, or Educational Leadership.
All of these books acknowledge class inequalities in K-12 and higher education but the chapters generally aren't intended to deepen students' or others' understanding of these structural inequalities, as the earlier critical volumes were. Instead, authors focus on how to better usher individual students to graduation. When sociological theories of class and inequalities are mentioned, they're summarized in a few paragraphs and citations are typically secondary sources from the Student Affairs/ Higher Education literatures. (Summaries of Bourdieu often misrepresent his work, but that's for another post).
One such volume, Ardoin and martinez' Straddling Class in the Academy opens with clear statements of class inequalities and disparate outcomes for poor and working-class students in college while also often referring to class as an "identity" rather than an ascribed position within social hierarchies. The chapters are written to shed light on poor and working-class students' experiences that others on campus may not recognize, with the understanding that others will become more inclusive as they learn more about these students. Chapters are organized around the perspectives of authors at different points of campus engagement, from undergraduates through senior administrators and tenured faculty.
A summary chapter on the "shared social class experiences" focuses on ways to support individual students in adapting to college while sustaining what they understand as authenticity: they note that authors speak of a common work ethic grounded in class, of "stereotype threat" that can be internalized, of the financial and personal costs of college such as confusing new relationships with family, and of the challenges of imposter syndrome and code switching. They suggest scrutiny of such things as the types of food offered on campus (with examples of social events that serve "fancy" food unfamiliar to poor or working-class students), the financial challenges of making early housing deposits, or the unwritten rules of faculty meetings once first-gen students become academics. They suggest also that more privileged actors on campus be "trained" to reflect on their own class positions and on "microagressions".
The editors conclude that poor and working-class students and staff bring skills to their work on campus and "rather than viewing these individuals through a deficit lens, we can learn from the ways they navigate campus with success". In this focus on success, they do not mention how many first-generation students leave college without graduating. Ardoin and martinez encourage readers to understand from the collected narratives that creating change involves steps that are "neither huge nor overwhelming" as they recommend such things as offering lunch at all day meetings to acknowledge that purchasing food will be hard for some, proactively explaining campus terms to ensure that poor and working-class students have "college knowledge", "paying it forward" as first-gen graduates support other students.
All of this brings us to Adam Rodríguez's Know That You Are Worthy: Experiences from First-Generation College Graduates, one of the newest of this genre of books edited from within Student Affairs framework. Rodríguez, a clinical psychologist, asked authors to write directly to students, addressing five prompts: Applying to and preparing for college, experiences in college, contributors to success, the role of family, and tips and advice. He intends the book to be both a source of inspiration to students and a means to deepen faculty and administrators' understanding of these students so that they might "redress the problematic systematic issues within and outside of institutions" that create hardships for students. Again, the barriers are primarily framed as campus actors not yet fully understanding first-generation students.
He, too, writes in the introduction of educational inequalities and refers to sociologist Pierre Bourdieu's theories of cultural capital, but at least some of his quotes about Bourdieu are from a 2012 book about first-gen students written by Student Affairs staff and faculty and offer very limited insight into Bourdieu's analysis of cultural capital.
The book does include authors from a range of disciplines along with Student Affairs faculty and staff, but perhaps because they were asked to write directly to individual student readers in response to prompts, few go beyond description of their experiences. There is resilience. There are happy endings. There is little anger.
The authors describe a wide range of experiences in their "preparing for college" sections. One author knew to apply to eight colleges and another refers to attending every college fair they could. Others have no access to college fairs and write that no one in high school ever talked with them about college.
Indeed, so often, chance mattered in these authors' stories: One student was stopped in the hall by a teacher just after a high school counselor advised her against applying to prestigious colleges, and that teacher told her that the counselor was wrong. One author had a 5th grade ESL teacher show her (but not her classmates) how to test out of ESL so that she could apply to take the honors courses that met at the same time in middle school. The child of a housekeeper learned from his mother's client about a special program to support students like him.
It's difficult to find the common themes across these chapters about how these authors found their way to college, yet one unmistakable thread is that there is little in place to ensure that all poor and working-class students learn about what is possible for them. Instead, access to things like college fairs and good college counseling seem the exception.
Once in college, multiple authors write of experiencing "neglect and invisibility". Over and over in the "tips and advice" sections of their essays, the authors encourage students, individually, to initiate help-seeking and to "find community" to overcome the many ways that campuses are structured to exclude them. In the end, the authors' collective hope seems to be that students will feel less alone in hearing others' stories and will know that they are "worthy" of support that they may not yet be seeking.
Only a handful of authors mention learning anything in college about why students like them may feel invisible and neglected in college: One wrote of immersing himself in African American studies and another wrote of coming to understand his family's circumstances in courses in sociology and class inequalities. A refugee student spoke of "decades of resource deprivation" and systemic exclusion of students like her. An author who attended the Ivy League writes of how inequalities became visible to him as he saw the glaring differences between attending a high school (his) in a state ranked near the bottom in educational quality and the wealth of resources taken for granted by his peers. Though this subset of authors each write about how important it was for them to understand the broader contexts for their struggles, the possibility of making such analyses more available to first-gen students isn't included in summary recommendations.
Only one author mentions speaking up against classism: In a course, a professor made a quip disparaging workers like those in her community, and she spoke up to call out his classism. There's no other mention in the book about preparing students to recognize and refuse interpersonal classism as part of encouraging them to make sense of their precarious sense of worthiness.
The book does include a 10 page appendix "glossary of select college terms" in part as a nod to the common assertions that Bourdieu's "cultural capital" refers to "college knowledge".
Rodríguez is deeply compassionate and holds deep respect for each of these authors (he describes them as "brave"). Unlike much of the Student Affairs literature, he explains that the "strength and asset based" portrayals of first-generation students, intended to negate "deficit thinking" about them, can downplay the harm of class inequalities. His writing about his counseling encounters with first-generation students include poignant examples of campus actors stereotyping low-income students. He argues for destigmatizing mental health so that more students who encounter hostility and stereotyping will seek individual help. It is his job to help these students to heal; it is not clear whose job it might be to keep these actors from doing more harm. He writes of how first-generation students in college can feel like a "traveler in another country", yet doesn't mention why there are so few guidebooks, tourist offices, or well-lit signs to make their visit enjoyable. He doesn't discuss why so many other students claim campus spaces with the distinctive privileges of ownership.
His recommendations to campuses are overwhelmingly interventions on behalf of individual students: early outreach from campuses to college-bound high school students, one-on-one mentoring, mental health counseling, staff pro-actively checking in with individual students about financial aid.
But then, after so many chapters written to inspire students to seek the support that colleges do not routinely offer, Rodríquez briefly switches gears as he writes in his closing chapter about a college that is pro-actively rethinking its own practices to better serve poor and working-class students. He mentions the University of Texas program that provides students who would otherwise be assigned to large "gateway" lecture classes with smaller classes and extra peer and faculty time. The program is explicitly about supporting students whose high schools did not have the resources to teach them what other students routinely learn. In contrast to the advice of most of these chapters, this UT program does not require students to seek help or community on their own. The university accepts responsibility for initiating these things because the university understands how and why these students cannot take these things for granted.
Rodríguez does not write about how advocates for students or staff can lobby for many more such reforms on their own campuses, or why campuses that have long documented high attrition rates for first-gen students have not created similar programs, even after the New York Times wrote about the success of the University of Texas project a decade ago.
The chapters are moving and inspirational. The project of writing directly to students is novel, and the authors speak of important things within the prompts, including the harm done to poor and working-class students by others. The book focuses on accepting one's personal worth as key to persevering through college and of course this is essential. A book that asked individual author to offer "tips and advice" to individual readers can indeed help to inspire students to persevere when facing so many barriers.
It may also be inspirational to read about collective work toward dismantling barriers, but that is not the focus of this book.
I was once privileged to hear the scholar Peggy McIntosh speak about "feeling like a fraud". She spoke first of the self-doubt that comes with entering new social spaces, the persistent fear (and possible nightmares) that at any moment, "they" will realize that they let us in by mistake, that it's only a matter of time before they realize that we are undeserving frauds.
This sounds very much like the "imposter syndrome" frequently written about in the first-gen Student Affairs narratives. Yet McIntosh did not see the solution as individual resilience or counseling.
She urged the audience to understand our work as newcomers within spaces from which we had long been excluded as the two sides of a Moebius strip that are, in fact, a single side operating in a continuous loop.
McIntosh was emphatic that this "feeling like a fraud" is not simply a psychological state. On one surface of the Moebius strip, she advised us, we have to stop letting them treat us like frauds. Those who have long controlled social spaces are convinced that they deserve their power and may well see us as frauds ("unworthy" in the tile of Rodríguez's book). We deserve to insist together that they stop.
On the other surface, we must also spot fraudulence in the public roles we are asked to play. As we enter new social spaces, we have to question the norms of the those spaces. She urged us to see the fraudulence in myths of meritocracies that justified others' power to exclude us, in the lure of being rewarded with titles that isolate us from collaborative work, in the inauthentic language we're required to use to prove our insider status.
Written on two sides of a paper strip, these became the same "side" when that strip is twisted into the endless loop of that Moebius strip: We are not frauds. There is so much fraudulence in the things they want us to do in these spaces that we've struggled to finally enter.
McIntosh was speaking of women in this talk, and I want first-generation students to embrace their own Moebius strip.
I want them to be able to say "yes I/we need some help". And also:
"It's fraudulent to keep urging each of us to seek help one-by-one without also giving us space to understand and to speak publicly about the circumstances of our lives in which we have been denied the very resources needed to do well here, resources that our peers take for granted.
It's fraudulent to frame only us as needing help when daily, we endure the judgment of peers and faculty and staff who are ignorant of us, ignorant of economic inequalities, and blind to the consequences of their ignorance."
McIntosh was talking about challenging self-interested systems of power that keep us from questioning and critiquing. That work is not simply about good-willed people who do not yet understand our needs; it is not only about serving familiar foods at campus events or creating glossaries of terms when those in power decline to explain things (though both are fine). It is about people convinced by test scores and access to exclusive spaces and by public admiration and by the habits of power that they have personally earned more than others who then act to exclude those they deem less worthy.
Thus far, there seem not to be anthologies or lines of research or organizations that bring these two sides of the strip together. The paragraphs written about critical sociology in the Student Affairs literature skip over the parts about unjust uses of power by people convinced that they have earned their privilege through talent and hard work. There are too few critical scholars involved in the hands-on work of supporting first-generation students.
It's simply not that hard to create programming in which students can catch up on algebra while also learning why their communities have had to settle for unqualified algebra teachers for generations. It's simply not that hard for others on campus to be expected to understand how much they've benefitted from those structural inequalities.
It seems simply not that hard for Student Affairs staff/professional preparation programs and critical scholars of educational inequalities to share the work of empowering poor and working-class students to make sense of the barriers to their class mobility. These narratives are all good and important. The conversations among these people working in very different fields would matter even more.
[I co-edited several anthologies within the critical traditions: Trajectories, an anthology of scholars in the field of education, and Amplified Voices, Intersecting Identities, two-volume anthology of graduate students and early career scholars navigating institutional power.]
