I listen closely to campus messaging for what first-generation college students learn about themselves via available support programming. These programs do, of course, offer explanations for why students need support. It is safe to say that most commonly, what students are learning about the circumstances of their own lives is at best selectively incomplete.

A recent research brief "It's Kind of a Flex": Reflections on Being a First-Generation College Student from First-Gen Forward, the national coordinating organization for first-gen programming on campuses, is an example of selective omissions. The brief is based on student focus groups talking about "first-generation student identity and belonging". All the students were volunteers from "within our networks" of campus programming and all were interested in talking about themselves within those contexts.

The premise of the brief is that first-gen students must first recognize their "identity" as a first-gen student in order before accessing resources available to them. They also have to know that they are first-gen before seeking out sponsored social activities with other first-gens so that they develop a sense of "belonging" on campus. Students were asked about developing this "first-gen identity".

These 45 students talked about learning that it mattered in "how they define themselves" to realize that:

• Their parents had not gone to college but the parents of peers had.
• They need support but often didn't realize that until they got to college and noticed they were behind peers.
• Other students "just know" about things that they don't know.
• Their educational experiences and family backgrounds were "unusual" on campus.
• But in the end, they realize that they are uniquely resourceful because they figure out how to do things on their own.

One student mentions that she learned that others students had "grown up with college counselors". That is the only mention in the entire report of any material inequalities between first-gen students and most of their peers.

There is no mention of experiencing shock at how casually peers spend money, share travel stories, or drop casual classism into game night at the dorm. There's no mention of any of these students fearing stigma if their "identity" becomes widely known to peers. There's no mention of basic needs insecurities or the grind of working multiple jobs while attending school full-time.* All of these things are mentioned in the sociological literature about first-gen students, but none are mentioned here.

There's no mention of the students even having questions about any of these things. "Different" is neutral.

As with many things within First-Gen Forward, students are praised for overcoming challenges and coming out stronger:

The most commonly-mentioned strengths were self-reliance and resourcefulness, which were frequently linked and came up in one-fifth of the comments coded as related to assets. Focus group participants regularly note that, because they do not have parents who can help them navigate college, they have to figure out their paths on their own. This builds their ability to find answers and make plans on their own. Over time, they come to see themselves as capable problem-solvers and confident in their ability to navigate new challenges.

This summary is deeply and selectively incomplete.

1. It is selectively incomplete to take for granted how poorly campuses often decline to just explain the rules of success. In this brief about how students come to feel that they "belong", the students actually describe themselves as being outside of critical campus information networks. The authors of the brief selectively omit the possibility of students advocating for proactive clear campus communication as a right for all admitted students.
2. The language about family– found so often in this network – selectively omits much of students' lives. In practice and in the literature of the field, students learn that they struggle "because they do not have parents who can help them navigate college". This language erases the layers of inequitable access to public and private resources that may be far more significant than any information that their parents might pass on about college itself. There's no mention of unmanageable workloads for counselors in many high schools or a district's lack of funds for AP or other advanced coursework. There's no mention of how wealthier districts recruit away the most experienced and qualified teachers with higher pay. There's no mention of how many high schools are just skipped over when college staff go out on high school recruitment visits. There's no mention of staff cuts on campuses that restrict students' access to the information they need.
3. That language about parents' advice being the primary difference between first-gen students and their peers omits that privileged parents know that parental advice alone cannot steer their students to success. Thus, long before college, they move to the right neighborhoods with the best possible schools where there will be college nights and staffed counseling offices. There will be other parents in these neighborhoods who've graduated from a range of places and can arrange introductions or special campus tours at places students may not have otherwise considered. Once their children are at college, they negotiate summer internships with neighbors of family members so that their children can learn insider professional knowledge and networking while the first-gen students are working retail and fast food jobs. Beyond advice, parents pay for interview clothes and rent for the first months of a new job in expensive places. These parents know that personal advice is only a fraction of what they have to offer. Yet first-gen students keep hearing that relative to peers, being first-gen mainly means being deprived of parents' knowledge about how to register for classes or declare a major. Other students "just know things" is very different from "resources have been invested in ensuring that other students have been taught things".
4. Finally, this applause of students' self-assessment that they now have figured out how to move forward is potentially setting first-gen students up for the very same struggles in graduate school or career that they experienced early in college. There is no reason to expect that "on their own", first-gen students will learn the hidden norms of graduate school admissions and fellowships, choosing graduate school advisors, career hiring, or the norms of professional workplaces. Career centers are wonderful, and career centers do not replace the career networking that starts back in the neighborhood and continues in Greek houses. This praise of first-gen student resilience and resourcefulness is especially curious given that the authors of this brief selectively omit the organization's own data that 76% of first-gen students never graduate in part because their resilience was not enough and they couldn't access resources.

I do not know who in this field of professional first-gen student support decided that for the most part, structural class inequalities simply make students stronger and thus are irrelevant to students' understanding of their "identity".

I do know that telling first-gen students, over and over, that they are "different" primarily because they can't access parents' advice is, at best, selectively incomplete and possibly even dishonest. Good intentions, notwithstanding of course, it is simply not true that the most relevant difference between first-gen students and their peers is what each can learn when they call home confused.

I believe that applauding students for doing things "on their own" rather than mentoring them to be vocal advocates for what they need is actually applauding them for being willing to settle for much less than other students (and their parents) demand of their institutions.

I also know that on most campuses, there are no faculty mentoring first-gen students in self-advocacy against institutional norms and practices , and no faculty teaching them the broader historical and political contexts of why they were behind before they ever arrived on campus.

But in the pages and pages and pages of materials from First-Gen Forward that I've read over years, I've never seen any explanation for why, unlike Student Affairs programs that collaborate with other units to teach students to recognize and resist racism and sexism and homophobia, any mention of classism or class inequalities is selectively omitted from work with first-gen students.

Declining to clarify who is making these decisions about what students should or shouldn't know about their "identities" and "belonging" is perhaps the most puzzling selective omission of all.

Footnote:

*It is very common in this literature for scholars and practitioners to point out that not all first-gen students are from poor and working-class families, and this is, of course, true. A small number may be the children of parents working the declining number of high wage jobs that can be obtained without a degree. The overwhelming number of "first-gen" students are from poor and working-class families, and I am absolutely fine with even wealthier first-gen students learning about structural inequalities within education.

Thoughout this summary of big changes coming on July 1 to Pell Grant eligibility, student loan repayments, and student loan eligibility are the words "chaos", "confusion", "panic", and "students don't know about".

A Federal Department of Education that has not yet demonstrated their concern for or knowledge of student needs has worked to rewind some Biden programs, to eliminate others, but to extend Pell grants to short-term career prep programs.

So much of this seems like solutions to poorly understood or non-existent problems.

It's taken them a long time to make all of these changes, and it's taking them a long time to develop clear communications about what students and potential students (and their parents) need to do.

If you know students heading to college, in college, or paying off college loans, please send this summary to them, talk with them about what some of this might mean for them, and try to be sure that they can get in touch with caring people who can help sort all this out.

I was just mindlessly scrolling in line at the hardware store when I learned about admissions readers penalizing low-income students more often for using AI/Large Language Models (LLMs) when they write college admissions essays. This post would have stopped me in my tracks had the line actually been moving:

I tracked down the (open access) article when I got home, and it's fascinating research that (of course) gets to even more nuance than the post that jumped out of my feed that morning. Essentially:

• Apparent use of AI while writing admissions essays rose sharply in recent years among high socio-economic status and low socio-economic status students, with use increasing more among low SES students. Given that higher SES students have long had more access to formal and informal coaching and editing for their essays, the authors argue that this higher rate of AI assistance among lower-income students might be expected:

Higher adoption among lower SES applicants represents a rational response to resource constraints, a form of technological leveling the digital divide literature has long anticipated.

• While many high SES students have long employed coaches and editors to craft their essays, AI seems to have given some low SES students a new form of feedback or "coaching" on their essays. With increased use of AI across the board that also tended to standardize the writing of higher SES students, lower SES students are submitting essays written in linguistic styles much closer to those of more privileged students.

BUT:

• It appeared that high SES students using AI were using more sophisticated prompts when writing their essays because they had access to educational resources for learning how to use AI. Lower SES students figuring out AI on their own may have lost both voice and "authenticity" when seeking technological help in writing more linguistically complex essays. They may also have left more detectable traces of AI use in essays, while higher SES students had learned to polish AI output.
• In the end, though differences in linguistic styles between higher and lower SES students were significantly reduced with higher AI use, admissions rates for lower SES students declined slightly after widespread use of AI in preparing admissions essays. There was no improvement in outcome though essays were now linguistically very similar.
• One reason for this decline in admissions: Controlling for GPA, test scores, and other factors in the admissions file, low-income students whose essay suggested "intensive" AI students were twice as likely to be denied admission than high-income students who also had indicators of "intensive" AI use in essay preparation.

So, lower SES students may have been less-skilled in their use of AI for writing "authentically". They may have left more apparent traces of AI "help" in writing the essay.

AND:

The authors also correctly note that essays are not read in isolation. They're read in the context of all of the other information in the application. And thus:

Additionally, admissions readers may interpret polished writing with greater suspicion when it appears inconsistent with other aspects of a lower SES applicant’s profile. LLMs may also reproduce linguistic norms associated with privilege, generating text that reads as performatively sophisticated without the narrative specificity readers associate with genuine voice. {footnote numbers removed for clarity}

That mismatch between the kind of writing that a reviewer may expect of low SES students and the "polished writing" that students created with the help of AI/LLM may have been the nudge for readers to look more critically at these applications.

And, admissions readers then rejected the applications of lower-income students at higher rates than they rejected higher-income students whose essays also suggested "intensive" use AI when scrutinized by the researchers.

There are no technological magic bullets to solve the structural inequalities that leave lower-SES students with fewer college counselors and less access to information about what college admissions reviewers look for.

The authors thus do not settle for recommending that someone coach lower-income students about more sophisticated ways to use AI. They write instead that now that AI is used so extensively, we need much deeper understanding of "how AI tools interact with existing systems of educational stratification and to inform more equitable evaluation practices".

In the end, it comes down to the fairness of human decision-making, not just access to technology.

As a commenter on the post sarcastically wrote:

There's a right way and a wrong way to do things. The wrong way is to use AI to write your essay. The right way is to hire an ex-admissions officer at one of these schools to rewrite your essay, or if you don't have that kind of money, a recent graduate.

They're just enforcing academic standards!

But as this research suggests, privileged students also using AI the "wrong way" are penalized less often when they can access resources to learn more sophisticated ways to hide traces of inappropriate use.

And, privileged students are penalized less often even when doing it "wrong" when admissions counselors actively look for red flags in the applications of low-income students.

This study was based on review of 81,663 applications to one selective university between 2020 and 2024. I can think of a dozen studies to take this analysis even further on campuses across the country. Surely, someone reading this knows of graduate students who would love to dig deeper?

The White House/ Department of Education is withholding over $2 billion that Congress has allocated for Education programs, many of which are intended to improve schools and communities for low-income families and schools. Some of this money may still be dispersed later, but it is already months beyond normal timelines for funded projects to get their expected funds.

Education Week reporter Mark Lieberman lists all of the currently blocked programs in his article. Some of the funding–on-hold that might be of greatest interest to readers of this site:

• Support for colleges with high concentrations of Hispanic students, Native American students, Native Hawaiian and Native Alaskan students.
• Groups spurring and evaluating innovative practices for "high needs" students.
• Support for colleges with high concentrations of low-income students.
• Programs in distressed communities working to improve outcomes for children and families.
• Several teacher training programs as we face teacher shortages, especially in schools service low-income and working-class students.
• Grants for first-year college students from migratory or seasonal farm worker families.
• Grants to support migratory or seasonal farm workers get their high school equivalency credentials.
• Programs to improve family engagement in education.
• Programs to expand STEM opportunities for minority college students.

Poor and working-class students - particularly students of color, their families, and their communities are again collateral damage in the massive staff layoffs and administrative cynicism about the very existence of a federal Department of Education, even as much of DOE's work is in the service if equity and opportunity.

Among the good news that application rates are up now that the FAFSA revisions are complete is the sobering news that completion rates among students in mixed-status families dropped by more than 3000 in California. It appears that students living in households with one undocumented parent are opting out of applying for federal financial aid for fear their information would expose loved ones to immigration officials. Applications for state financial aid are also down.

“That is not a small fluctuation,” said Nicole Kangas, a CSAC spokesperson, at a recent media roundtable. “That is a sharp and significant withdrawal from financial aid and higher education systems. Each one of these numbers represents a student who is a U.S. citizen and is eligible for federal aid, as well as state aid. And we should be concerned by any signs of application declines among this vulnerable group.”

Kangas, of the California Student Aid Commission, continued:

“ California has spent years telling students that college is the pathway to opportunity. But for many immigrant students and [U.S. citizens in] mixed-status families, that message now collides with another reality: fear,” Kangas said. “Fear that applying for aid could expose a loved one to harm, and fear that the systems designed to support them may not be able to protect them. That fear is reshaping college-going behavior in California in real time, and if we do not respond with urgency, we risk losing an entire generation of students.”

I hope that other states are also collecting this data and that student advocates everywhere will also speak up about a federal government leveraging fear as social control.

I deeply hope that any high school senior who aspires to college has boundless support from teachers and advocates, unfettered access to information, and the open advocacy of every college they wish to attend.

There is a school district in Arizona that served only 9 students last year. There are only three houses in the district that can be taxed to fund these schools. But an energy pipeline running through the district is also taxed, so funding for children in the district's two classrooms is higher than the state average.

The district boundary lines around those two houses were drawn to ensure that the 5,700 diverse students in the district just to the east won't share any of that pipeline revenue. That district to the east struggles to hire support teachers for hundreds of English language learners and relies on volunteers and over-stretched teachers to provide summer programs. There are no staff to advise students about how to get to college.

Drawing school district boundaries around the tax base generated from the most valuable property in a city or county is just one way in which privileged parents hoard opportunity for their own children at the expense of others.

New America, an equity-driven policy think tank, offers three case studies of how inequalities between neighboring districts are sustained. The cases also illustrate what might happen if district lines were redrawn to ensure that there is enough local tax revenue to fund everyone's schools. While the tiny district in Arizona is extreme, we also learn about a Detroit suburb that is carved up among three school districts and a rural county in Iowa divided into two districts with diverse students in the southern part of the country walled off from the property taxes generated in the more affluent, white communities to the north.

The lines were not arbitrarily drawn. In that Detroit suburb, 73% of the students in one district are Black and many are low income. The boundaries lines drawn to create the other two districts ensure that property taxes from new commercial businesses and expensive homes fund only affluent white students. That majority Black district can no longer afford band or theater programs.

In the rural Iowa district in the southern part of the county, 19% of the students live below the poverty line and many are English language learners, but with little valuable property to tax, their school district has to get by on $1000 less per student than the state average. The southern district can't compete with other districts to fill teaching positions, especially in shortage areas like Special Ed. The wealthier northern district in the same county serves mostly white students.

Schools are unequally funded in the U.S. because of political decisions to appease privileged families. There have been legal challenges to unequal with-in state funding in 45 of the 50 states, and the courts have required more equitable (but not equal) funding in many of those cases. Yet deep inequalities remain. Wealthier families can threaten to move their children to private schools if resources are "taken" from them. Wealthier families can organize to defeat state politicians who work for fair funding. Wealthier families can convince themselves and others that they only want what's best for their children and that only they have worked hard to provide for them.

Too few students from the tax-starved districts make it to college; too few students in college learn much of anything about who benefits and who is excluded from the ways that we fund schools.

New American reminds us that the resources are there to provide more equitable schooling for all children:

The students of Oak Park, Nogales, and South Tama deserve no less than students in the best-funded school system. But greater funding is just out of reach, walled behind school district borders that separate students from the resources they need. The fact that nearby districts have so much more property tax capacity makes for stark comparisons between neighbors. But therein also lies the good news: The resources are there. If the borders that outline these districts were redrawn with equity in mind, students could access a much fairer share of the state’s property tax revenue, and much more support for their schools.

Part of building political support for more equitable school funding would be for colleges to ensure that everyone who graduates understands the inequitable pathways taken by students now sitting together in the same classes. We can't solve educational inequalities that we decline to see. We won't learn from poor and working-class students about their own experiences when their support programs deny them knowledge of any of this.

In New York City, a small number of PTAs --2.5% of all public schools in the city – raised almost half the money raised by all the PTAs across the entire city. Children from affluent families attend public schools where parents privately raise millions to ensure that their children get extra air conditioners, extra teachers, beekeeping programs, arts residencies, extra cafeteria aides, teachers with advanced training, and updated libraries.

One third of the schools in the city raised no private funds at all.

Wealthy parents across the country raise money for their own children's public schools, but the disparities in New York school fundraising (reflecting the city's broad disparities in wealth) are in a league of their own.

As elsewhere, NYC PTAs sometimes justify building these private slush funds by pointing to the supplemental funding for schools serving lower-income students. If some children get public money for tutors to bring them up to grade level or reading aides to help in crowded classrooms or free breakfast, how can anyone object to them raising money for science labs or music programs that others kids in the city can't access?

One possible measure of the shallowness of privileged families' actual beliefs in "merit" is how intentionally they strategize for their children from the time they're toddlers. From selecting preschools, to moving to the best school districts and then negotiating for the best teachers and highest academic tracks, to hiring coaches to position their children for admission at the best possible colleges, these parents leave little to chance. No one believing that social systems simply reward the brightest and most hard working would invest so much in bending those systems to their will.

Poor and working-class families are able to exercise much less control over their children's futures. We know that especially with federal budget cuts, many families cannot pay preschool tuition, afford to live the neighborhoods where schools have smaller class sizes, or enroll their children in enrichment activities after school. Few of these things are affordable to the poor and working-class parents of children who are also very bright and hardworking.

Josh Cohen, education policy scholar at Michigan State, writes about how some states are stepping up to fund vital educational supports to families and children as federal programs are being cut. But there is wide variation across states.

In Colorado, a poor/working class child may be supported by state investments in high quality childcare, preschool, tutoring, free school meals without stigma, and enriching after school programs.

Yet if her family had moved a few states north to Montana when she was born, she'd benefit from these things only if her family could pay for them.

Cohen's estimates how common (or rare) such access to affordable state-funded family supports is:

20 states fund some form of high-dose tutoring, from literacy initiatives to tutoring grants that began as part of COVID-recovery plans that states developed in addition to federal support.

20 states fund afterschool programming through a variety of out-of-school time grants and funding streams.

20 states have their own child care investments beyond a federal baseline called the Child Care Development Fund that’s been the subject of Trump’s attacks on so-called waste, fraud, and abuse in Minnesota.

Nearly all states have invested in formal pre-K services, ranging from near-universal services in states like Florida, Georgia, Michigan and Oklahoma, to more targeted coverage in the rest.

Only 9 states have universal school meals, but another 5 are broadening their more limited meal programs.

By this count, only six states—California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, and New York—are investing in all five program areas beyond federal support. Quite a number of other states like Minnesota, New Jersey, Texas, and Washington are investing in four of the five, or beginning partial investment in all areas.

Cohen is doing this analysis in part to argue that democrats should include child and family supports within a broader "affordability" political agenda, as these are

the kinds of costs parents really do lose sleep over and do argue about at the kitchen table every day: how to pay for tutoring, afterschool programs, preschool, and other services directly associated with their children.

I wholeheartedly support that broad "affordability" agenda and also think, as is my way, about the political education that we need about unequal access to these things in the first place.

As I've often written, first-gen programming on campus focuses on students' personal resilience and assertiveness as they try to catch up academically. The literature on first-gen students frequently acknowledge their "struggle" in college, but says little about how students in some states might be struggling a little less if they had access to an afterschool science club in middle school, or to quality preschool before they ever got to kindergarten. There is little talk in this programming about unequal childhoods as a source of the "struggles"; instead, first-gen students learn implicitly that remedies to unequal childhoods are best offered in the first year of college.

I like to imagine that over the four (or six or longer) years that students may engage with this programming on campus, supporters could replace some of the inspirational speakers during "First Gen Week" or other campus inclusivity projects to instead talk about how, as citizens, we do well to analyze the deep economic inequalities between states, communities, and schools and to learn how democratic participation can change public policy that currently normalizes unequal childhoods.

I will imagine this because I have yet to see any clear explanation for why these campus support programs frame the vestiges of class inequalities in childhoods as personal "struggle", when allocation of public resources is subject to public policy making within our (weakening) democracy.

It's graduation season, so I want to repost this piece that I wrote very early in the life of this site. It's about a profile in a campus publication of a remarkable first-gen graduating student and how the author of the piece (he also seems to be first-gen) framed her story as "inspirational" while downplaying her intellectual and political work and embellishing what she's said about her childhood. There are a lot of these kinds of profiles of first-gen students this time of year.

Reading this again today, I wonder what might happen if even a handful of faculty on each campus worked with graduating first-gen students next year to author counter-stories to these annual stories of "inspiration" on many campuses. These stories implicitly normalize unequal childhoods and treat educational inequality and restricted access to public resources as mere speed bumps in the road to unlimited opportunity.

What would it take to create spaces for first- gen students to craft their own counter stories?

How is the new, long-awaited simplification of the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) working? Pretty well, according to Eddy Conroy of the National College Attainment Network.

For years, I ran a program at my campus that prepared college students to assist high school students who would be first-generation students in selecting and applying to college. FAFSA Night was one of their biggest challenges. The financial aid application was notoriously difficult, especially for families where adults were not yet proficient in English, where families had moved often and lost some records, where parents were ambivalent about their kids going to college and were slow to provide the required documentation.

But on FAFSA night, our college students would team up with the guidance counselors in school computer labs to walk students (and sometimes parents) through the applications, but no one was clear that we were getting things right.

Now, finally, Conroy reports, the FAFSA takes 15 minutes, not an entire evening. A record number of students in the high school class of 2026 completed the application. Completion rates are up for students in rural and urban schools, for white and students of color, and across income levels.

Conroy writes:

The biggest increases in college applications are coming from the students we want to help: first-generation, historically underrepresented and coming from communities with the lowest median incomes. People with fewer resources struggle more with administrative burdens. And so making the financial aid process easier for these students shows that a well-designed universal process can level the playing field and reduce inequality.

It's a rare instance of good news about educational inequality. It took much too long to get there, the Pell Grants that students may be eligible for are still inadequate, but the organizations that fought so hard for these changes deserve all the flowers and all the applause.

Go read Conroy's whole post to learn more about the long saga of removing the "administrative burdens" of applying for financial aid and the imperatives that we do so.

I highly recommend this video from More Perfect Union about how, as budgets for community parks and recreation programs have been stretched thin, private investors stepped in to profit from children's sports in expensive private leagues and facilities.

While countries like Norway ensure that all children have the right to safe and supportive participation in sports, U.S. families who can afford it are filling private sports programs requiring high entry fees, preferred hotels for out-of-town games, exclusive streaming rights for kids' games, and branded merch. Scheduling children in these intense programs requires equally intense involvement of caregivers – usually mothers.

It's yet another example of how privileged parents hoard opportunity via private, for-profit enclaves that dilute political support for public resources for all children. All the things that we've been told about sports: The character building, the healthy exercise, the potential for generous college scholarships – all are now monetized by investors and hoarded by parents focused only on what's best for their own kids.

Watch and wonder at what youth sports have become in the U.S.:

I follow FirstGen Forward both to learn how campuses are serving first-gen students and to track what this influential national advocacy group is recommending be done for them. There, I learned about how St. Joseph University holds a Day of Dialogue each year to support its mission of campus inclusiveness. Classes are canceled and keynoters and concurrent sessions highlight first-person experiences as the spark for discussion throughout the day. Sessions are intended to be "practical, interactive, and action-oriented events". Last year included a session for first-generation students. I know almost nothing about this campus, but I do want to look closely to how this first-gen session seems to have differed in important ways from what happens elsewhere during this event.

Planners of days like this take for granted that many undergraduates and others on campus have limited experiences or knowledge of people different from themselves. They work on days like this because the goal of inclusion has not yet been fully realized. The session planners and the administration supporting an entire day of dialogue on inclusion assume that for everyone to feel that they belong, the campus community will hold spaces where more powerful actors listen to and dialogue with the less powerful.

So what happens on these days? One must have a campus email address to access the schedule for recent events but there are other online traces of the day.

One trace is the header image for the event log-in website that features multiple covers of books written in the first person by minoritized authors to educate those from more privileged groups about their history, perspectives, agency, and experiences – all from a perspective of critique of injustice within those histories and experiences, all toward making the campus more inclusive.

The student newspaper has also published write-ups of some of what transpires in sessions in recent years. Sessions were organized to build awareness of issues such as the politics of Black hair in the workplace, neurodiversity, or the "white savior" complications of service trips abroad. Another year, there was session on breaking stereotypes of Latinas and another on "learning the perspectives and experiences of others" in civil dialogue across differences.

In all of these, administrators, speakers and session organizers assume that the social structures of the campus were built upon the naiveté and/or the indifference and/or the intentional harm of more powerful others. The work of inclusivity is far from done on campuses.

And Then There Was a First-Gen Session

The recent session for first-gen students was based on very different starting points. With the deepest respect to the student who organized this session, the focus in this session reflected the national framing of first-generation programming that is more typically organized by professional staff. It's that national programming I want to question, with this particular day on this particular campus as an example.

In other groups on Dialogue Day, participants seem to have spoken in the first person about actions and policies that negate the intent of "inclusion", in dialogue with those in positions to enact change.

In the first-gen session, students, faculty, and staff did not engage in dialogue with others on campus. Instead, the session focused inward, in conversations with one another, on "imposter syndrome" as a personal psychological trait that can get in the way of personal success. Students in the session were reminded to believe that "I belong here too", as if inclusion is within their own control. There is nothing in the program write up of anything beyond the students' own mindsets that might be making them feel as if they're imposters.

The session did not seem to discuss that membership in any community is always relational, built within daily encounters with those already on the inside and within institutional policy and practice that render some groups invisible. There was nothing in the write-up of the session about anyone else on campus – intentionally or not – creating barriers to first-gen students's inclusion and belonging.

As in so much of first-gen programming, there was nothing about being a student who may have attended underfunded schools in economically struggling communities and only realized that other students had much more when starting classes. There was nothing about how they may have learned to hide their class* backgrounds to avoid stigma. There was no acknowledgement that first-gen students can't compete with peers with very different access to resources. There was nothing about growing socio-economic inequality or how public policy that sustains educational inequality could be examined within the curriculum. There's no mention of faculty assumptions or institutional norms that enable those in power to confer or deny "belonging" to those seeking inclusion.

Even while the identities of first-gen students intersect with those of students in many other sessions, discussion of the "first-gen" dimensions of experiences focused personal, not institutional troubles. There was nothing about how first-gen students trying to join other identity groups face the "hostile ignorance" about class differences from more- privileged peers leading these groups.

Students learned in the first-gen session that imposter syndrome is conquered internally by learning to "reframe self-defeating thoughts and mindsets". Students themselves were applauded for offering one another encouragement and understanding. Participants were reminded of available resources on campus equipped to "help". Unlike the messaging in other sessions that even well-intended helpers will learn by listening to diverse students speaking on their own behalf, the implication in the first-gen session was that the helpers should be inherently trusted.

And this session offered first-gen students exactly the type of programming and messaging encouraged by national first-gen advocacy organizations which has typically been distanced from broader advocacy for diversity and inclusion on campus.

Earning the Right to Speak

On Dialogue Day, other minoritized students and faculty and staff were speaking directly to and with their more privileged peers and staff about their collective encounters of naiveté, misunderstanding, and discrimination.

It seems fair to ask why first-gen students were in a room with other first-gens and encouraged to psychologically "reframe" their own negative thoughts about whether they belong on campus. It seems fair to ask why the burden is placed on them, not the broader campus, to recognize their strengths when a session goal encouraged them to "Empower themselves to see their first-gen identity as a source of strength not as a limitation".

Will they be granted the right to speak to more powerful others of their own experiences only after they work to repair their own negative mindsets?

Because unlike the theme of Dialogue Day – that the campus still falls short of full inclusivity – first-gen students were encouraged to believe that regardless of their interpretations of their experiences of exclusion, privileged peers, faculty and staff have been there with welcoming and open arms all along.

*Footnote: It is common when people talk about social class on campus in the contexts of first-generation students, someone trained within the Student Affairs field will jump in to say that not all first-gen students are poor and working class. This is true, and at the same time, that gesture of inclusion toward middle class and higher-income first- students is often leveraged to shut down talk of class inequalities experienced by most first-gen students. The median income of the families of first-generation students is less than half that of continuing education students. Income, and parents who by definition do hold undergraduate degrees are strong indicators of the prevalence of poor/working class students in this population.

Many young people seem to be deciding to pursue education in the trades, partly because college now seems less practical and more expensive, partly because the right is intentionally driving public distrust in higher education.

Yet neither the federal government nor the states are creating space for them in affordable public community colleges. Public vocational schools and high school programs have thousands of students on wait lists. Union apprenticeship programs have many more applicants than they can enroll.

So students are, again, taking the rocky path of enrolling in for-profit trade schools that charge much higher tuition than public programs and are less regulated. The for-profit schools are again marketing to lower-income families with promises of high earnings and quick pathways to graduation ... if only students will take out student loans and then sign those loan checks over to the Wall Street investors behind these schools.

For-profit trade school revenue — much of it from student debt – is booming.

The federal government seems to be making the problem worse. The Department of Education is redirecting TRIO grants that were intended to assist marginalized young people in prepping for and applying to college to steer marginalized students into vocational programs.

Yet they're doing little to expand space in affordable programs or to control costs. Choosing to be become an auto mechanic or HVAC tech would be a fine choice if students could enter the trades without going deeply into debt, but the "profit" of these for-profit programs comes from charging tuition so high that students have to gamble on potentially- crippling loans.

While some Pell grants will now be available for short-term vocational programs, the ground rules for those new grants may have negative consequences for low-income families. And, the Pell programs have already been underfunded for decades.

We've already been down this road of for-profit colleges exploiting students with too few options. The Obama and Biden administration cancelled billions in student debt for students who were deceived by earlier iterations of fraudulent for-profit colleges and trade schools that left students deeply in debt for worthless coursework.

The same vulnerable populations are now being steered into this new wave of trade schools as states and the feds decline to fund affordable options for students heading either to college or to the service bays at auto dealerships.

The billionaire Secretary of Education cannot imagine a world in which we take a public interest in the education of all students, as citizens and as thriving members of their communities.

I'm a big fan of studying social class across the spectrum, from privilege to poverty. There are too few scholars studying "up" to see the actions and values of upper-middle class people when studying inequality.

There are exceptions: A good example of the scholarly work of studying "up" is the recent article Advantaged Families’ Opportunity Hoarding in U.S. K–12 Education: A Systematic Review of the Literature published in Review of Educational Research.

The team compiling this 2025 literature review write:

The concept of opportunity hoarding has been used by a growing number of education researchers and sociologists of education in recent years to describe the process through which relatively advantaged families (largely described in the literature as white and/or middle- or upper-middle class) secure and/or maintain scarce educational resources that favor their children at the expense of low income and/or racially minoritized young people and their families.

First, we need to attend to the starting point of this entire argument: scarce resources. Families may hoard more than their share of available public resources, and they may ensure that others won't benefit from the provision of more resources. Either way, privileged families look at the zero-sum landscape of school funding and siphon as many resources as possible from schools for other people's children and into the schools of own children.

In short, the authors argue, we can best understand the educational resources available to poor and working-class students by also studying how networks of privileged parents lay claim to those very resources.

The literature review is comprehensive: the authors review 33 empirical journal articles and 8 books, asking both what we currently understand about how these social processes work and where more needs to be known.

They identify three (sometimes overlapping) ways in which privileged parents opportunity hoard. Each section is dense, so among the highlights are these core strategies:

The creation of white space

Decades after the courts mandated an end to enforced segregation, networks of families work to protect white spaces within which to educate their own children.

Parents may fiercely defend "historic" (pre-integration) school attendance boundaries when districts try to integrate schools by assigning children from adjacent neighborhoods to previously all-white schools. Parents threaten to leave for private schools or organize against school board members who support redrawn attendance boundaries. Suburban schools that served white flight families may consolidate to build political power against efforts to consolidate suburban and urban districts into country districts. White parents may stop voting for school tax levies when they're thinking about about moving as neighborhoods become more integrated, torching the quality of the neighborhood schools behind them as they move on.

In multiple states, parents in affluent districts with impermeable racial boundaries have organized to ensure that their property taxes benefit only their children though other parents or policy makers organize for a more equitable distribution of taxes across districts.

This all then becomes self-sustaining: Well-funded schools attended primarily by upper-middle class white students are designated "excellent" in published school rankings, bestowing academic status on their children and their parents. Property values go up in those neighborhoods with "good" schools, shutting less affluent parents out of home ownership near those schools. Parents then use the cudgel of formal designations of "excellence" to fend off any changes to attendance boundaries or programming that might benefit other families.

In all these ways, parents with political power in their communities have worked to sustain segregated public schools in the name of "wanting what's best" for their own children.

School Choice and School Selection

Districts have sometimes tried to encourage voluntary desegregation of neighborhood schools by dangling carrots in front of privileged parents: Administrators will create sought-after programs (like a science focus, or dual language instruction, or performing arts) in schools serving more diverse families and then designate these schools as open enrollment to encourage voluntary desegregation. White affluent parents may then organize to get their children placed in those now-academically prestigious schools. When demand for these schools exceeds space, decision-makers may be biased toward ambitious families. Privileged parents' threats to appeal administrators' decisions against their children may also simply wear down administrators.

There is one twist to the tactic of hoarding slots in the "best" schools for privileged children: In states in which flagship universities now guarantee admission to the top percentage of graduates in state high schools (another effort at college desegregation without explicitly considering race in admissions decisions), researchers have found that some white families move to districts with lower achievement rates so that their children will be positioned to hoard these guaranteed college admissions spaces that would otherwise have gone to long-time residents. Those parents settle for fewer school resources for their children for part of high school in exchange for hoarding stress-free college admissions that they'd have had to compete for in their affluent home districts.

Organizational Routines

When schools do serve diverse populations, affluent parents work to ensure (through advocacy, appeals, and threats to leave) that their students get access to programs for gifted students, to Advanced Placement courses, or to particular teachers. Parents may advocate for their own children but also work to ensure that the structures that distinguish their children from others are maintained. It is not enough that their children are in the AP classes in a given school. It is also important that the school not dilute that status by offering more AP classes to more students.

Finally, in this section, the authors review studies of parent fundraising that allow families to deepen inequalities between their school and others by privately paying for arts or science or technology programs for their schools that are not available via public funding in other schools.

What's Not Being Studied

The authors thus recommend many additional areas of study – from learning how affluent parents across and within districts learn hoarding strategies from one another, to delving into intersectional forms of hoarding for class, gender, and racial privilege. They also note a few schools in which parents organized against others to preserve racial diversity and families who opt-in to integrated neighborhood schools rather than hoarding placement in specialized district schools. These exceptions, the authors argue, merit more study.

But in the end, the authors argue for much more study of parents' resource hoarding as part of what sustains educational inequalities:

This is a salient time to study the mechanisms that produce and maintain durable inequality in education given major cuts to public education in many U.S. school districts, neoliberal educational reforms and ideologies that contribute to increased competitiveness for “good” schools, increased competitiveness and high costs in postsecondary education, economic precarity facing many families in the United States, and a “parents’ rights” movement that centers whiteness and resists critical examinations of race and racism in U.S. schools and curriculum.

It will never be enough to study the resilience or values of poor and working-class families to explain how some children from these families make it to and through college. We'll only understand these students by locating their education within social class hierarchies in which powerful parents insist that poor and working-class students simply don't deserve good schools. It's not enough to study "imposter syndrome" as first-generation students question whether they're worthy of college. It's also essential to understand what first-gen students have witnessed as children and as college students as others used their political power to sustain systems that convey to them that they are, in fact, unworthy of the resources that more privileged children have.

My project this week has been setting up a Bluesky account for Education and Class. It's a work in progress but ...

[drumroll]

{here's how to find it though the link is wonky:}

Over there, I'll share some of my posts from this site, repost other social class-relevant content from Bluesky, and keep working to deepen our understanding of class and educational inequalities and the classed dimensions of being a first-gen student.

If you miss some of these posts in your email (or are just tired of all the email), you can follow the new account to link through to most posts via Bluesky.

If you're on Bluesky, follow the E & C account and I'll follow back.

And as always, I'd love for you all to join the conversation in the comments there or here.