This new brief report on a longitudinal study of 1000 first- year students entering college in 2018 deepens our understanding of both the inequalities that first-gen students face and of how much they have to each invest in finding ways through the barriers.
The authors point how "social, cultural, and economic vulnerabilities compound in ways that are difficult to resolve". First-gen students are less likely to be placed in honors programs, more likely to need to work, are less likely to be involved in student groups. The students credit their successes, over time, to other first-gen peers with more experience, mentoring by a small number of faculty, and the support of campus programming for marginalized students for helping them to learn about internships and campus jobs that build academic connections, and for learning the unwritten rules for getting through. Campuses are still far from recognizing and addressing the structural inequalities shaping these students' experiences.
We need more of this sort of research – multiple intertwining analyses over time – to better understand the complicated barriers and opportunities for students from poor and working-class backgrounds.
