The Hope Center has released a new analysis of emergency financial assistance on college campuses, and the news is not good.

Currently, half of all students could not come up with $500 in cash or credit to cover an unexpected expense, yet those emergencies are all to common:

... A car breaks down on the way to a final exam, a medical bill arrives the same week as rent, or a laptop fails in the middle of a term –for a student living close to the financial edge, any one of these can end a college career. The expense itself is often modest; what makes it destabilizing is the absence of savings, family support, or other financial buffers to absorb it. A small and timely grant can mean the difference between finishing the term and withdrawing altogether. (bold added)

Yet in Autumn 2025, only 4% of students got emergency grants to tide them over these events. During the pandemic, nearly 44% of students accessed emergency grants.

During the pandemic, the federal government provided billions for students to use on food, housing, transportation or medical care. That funding has ended, though so many students are still navigating food and housing insecurity and are working on aging laptops. Some states and campuses have created their own emergency funding programs, but few students are now accessing these funds.

There are are multiple reasons for the collapse in access to small emergency grants. Few students may even know about the availability of the funds, and campuses may not publicize local funds for fear that they could not meet demand. Many student financial aid offices are seriously understaffed, so there are too few resources available for outreach and communication. But ultimately, the campus and state programs can offer only a fraction of the funding that the pandemic era federal grants provided.

Drawing from research from the Trellis Project, the Hope Center confirms that first-generation, low-income, and single parenting students all face crises when facing routine emergency expenses in college.

Single parenting students are among the most financially exposed of all: 81% of single parents in the Trellis SFWS said they would struggle to find $500 for an emergency. Most relied on public assistance to get through the year.  Former foster youth and students from low-income and first-generation backgrounds carry a comparable burden. For a student with no family wealth, a single unexpected expense ceases to be a passing setback and becomes a decision about whether to remain enrolled.

The Hope Center offers suggestions about targeted communications and about reduced administrative "friction" when students need emergency support, and those recommendations should be read by staff and faculty and student leaders on every campus.

The report suggests, also, potential flexibility in some federal assistance that could translate into bigger pools of emergency funds. Beyond existing funds, the Hope Center also recommends restoration of emergency funding to ensure that all students can ride out the "unexpected" that everyone can expect.

Everyone advocating for first-generation and low-income students would do well to read those recommendations about federal support that made such a difference during the pandemic, and then contact their representatives about funding college for the thousands of students arriving on campus without the cushion of family wealth or even a savings account.

It's a political choice that students who cannot access family wealth may have to leave college before graduating when a car breaks down or a landlord issues eviction notices as they sell their building.

It's a political choice that some students are dropping out over the price of a laptop repair as their classmates benefit from families who hire rush consultants to help get them into the best Greek houses.

And it is certainly a choice for campuses to message to each that success in college is mainly about personal hard work and inherent talent.

When I was an undergraduate, I did volunteer work with a remarkable 2nd grade teacher in an elementary school in a working-class neighborhood.

The year before, the children had noticed that traffic on the street outside their school was getting busier, and many of them had to cross an increasingly busy intersection to get to and from home. It was becoming more scary to cross that street. They had a crossing guard but they were afraid for her, too.

They talked together one day in class about how that intersection needed a stop light. And the teacher asked the 7 year olds, "so how do we get a stop light?".

And thus began a months- long project in which students started out by wondering whether to write to the president or to celebrities to ask for help, but as their questions became more focused, they learned about city government and found, with the help of this teacher, the traffic control department. And the nice people in the traffic control department explained to the children that they would need to present data on traffic patterns to the people who had the power over how to spend the city's money.

So the children learned about sampling times for data collection, comparing data, explaining data, and presenting data. They used their growing literacy skills to present their report to city government. Most of these skills were in the 2nd grade curriculum for math, writing, and speaking, but instead of doing shallow decontextualized worksheets to practice these various skills, the teacher incorporated much of the required curriculum into a deeply engaging hands-on project that allowed the class to also learn things that few other 2nd graders learn.

And eventually, after months of work and learning collaborating and getting other adults involved and presenting their data, there was a new traffic light outside their school.

They were 7. And they had learned something about how to leverage power as they learned 2nd grade math and 2nd grade writing.*

Students and Power

Most upper middle class students are taught from childhood that systems exist to serve them and that they're entitled to expect changes in systems that do not serve them well. From watching family members negotiate the details of their children's schooling and then college, to participating in parents' political activities, to witnessing social interactions in which families assert their expectation that they will be heard in businesses, in public institutions, in courts of public opinion, many middle-class students learn self-advocacy and how to work "the system".

Many first-gen students are encouraged by their campuses to instead believe that systems are set up to help them, that they should work hard to learn those systems, and to be grateful when they eventually earn a place within them. We know that many first-generation students struggle and/or eventually just disappear from campus, but there is little in the literature on first-generation students learning to change what's working against their interests.

Learning Institutional Power

What if programming for first-gen students taught the fundamentals of advocating for change when systems on campus don't serve their interests? What if first-gen students were taught even some of the skills that other students learn from parents who hold positions of relative power and use that power to clear pathways for their children?

What might that look like?

Power Mapping

A few months ago, I followed a discussion on Blue Sky about working with students to frame problems and craft solutions by analyzing the power dynamics in an institution. Following that discussion and the links that people shared, I recognized that these strategies are essentially the grown-up version of what that 2nd grade teacher used to teach children about persuading power brokers about their civic concerns.

In that Blue Sky discussion, I came across Jordan Davis's series of essays, Power Mapping as Liberatory Pedagogy on his work with high school students to address the problems with access to educational technology. It's an excellent example of how this process might work with college students looking to solve other problems.

In his first post, Davis outlines the basic processes of defining problems and formulating strategies for change. His goals:

Demonstrate the relationship between stakeholders in a complex system, like a school district or neighborhood, and the power those stakeholders have relative to each other.

This helps students realize that rational decision-making often takes a backseat to power dynamics and competing interests, and that being a skilled practitioner in ed tech requires strong communication, advocacy, and analysis skills to navigate these bureaucracies.

Articulate wicked problems in their schools and school districts.

I encourage students to go, as I often say, three 'whys' deep. Yes, your school doesn’t have enough laptops because the district doesn’t have enough money for them. But why doesn’t the district have enough money for them? And to that answer, why?

Design solutions to the wicked problems they’ve identified by first considering the fears and motivations of all stakeholders involved.

They learn how to investigate unfamiliar stakeholder perspectives—such as superintendents, chief technology officers, parents other than their own.

Execute those solutions through the skills we learn in the class.

In his second post, Davis explores the history of techniques of power mapping, including work organizers of Black and anti-war activism of the 60s. Essentially, power mapping "can reveal stakeholders impacted by an issue that are typically overlooked and excluded, giving rise to innovative and inclusive ways to create change in a system. It can uncover hidden agendas and illuminate key questions related to how, when, why, and for whom decisions are made."

Students learn to search for potential collaborators, uncover institutional motives that run counter to motives of justice and fairness, and develop a deeper sense of belonging as they locate themselves within the many competing interests within any institution. Beyond all of this, students potentially learn a range of valuable soft skills, from leadership to problem solving, to empathisizing with those with whom they disagree.

Those goals seem, to me, essential for students navigating class and educational mobility against the odds, on campuses where the rules of success are often opaque.

In Part 3, Davis outlines the specific steps of his classroom activities with those high school students that enabled them to define problems, to identify stakeholders, and to explore the relationships among stakeholders. He generously includes examples of slides to guide student brain storming, a range of graphics though which students could map power relationships, and even a guide to grading such projects.

Miriam Posner, faculty in Information Sciences at UCLA, joined that conversation with her own set of very helpful slides that can be used guide students through these processes.

What Might This Look Like in First-Gen Programming?

Students are impossibly busy, staff are stretched, and faculty are under too many competing pressures.

And yet, if we imagine ...

Faculty in education or sociology or organizational leadership can craft course assignments that engage students in analysis of obstacles to college access.

"Introduction to College" first-year courses for credit often position first-generation students as different, behind other students, and fragile. Students could also be positioned as capable and knowledgeable about how the campus recruits, admits, advises, offers financial aid, and and organizes campus orientation. "Introduction to College' could involve students in improving any and all of those.

Social activities are important, and at the same time, first-gen students can also come to feel that they "belong" as they work together toward making their campuses better places for students like them.

There are curricular loopholes on many campuses that can be leveraged. When I proposed new courses, I also often proposed additional optional "linked" course numbers for a few credits for students who wanted to explore community-based or experiential applications of course content. First-gen students could be recruited to register for these linked options to work on campus analysis projects in a range of courses so that they're making progress toward degrees while also learning agency.

The point is that there are campus-specific mechanisms for creating spaces for students to learn about and to challenge those in power on their campuses, and students themselves could be part of finding these mechanisms.

If 2nd graders can be mentored by adults to solve complex problems very real to them, there have to be ways in which more first-generation students have opportunities to be mentored in bending systems of power to serve them.

I'd love to hear about any examples that readers know about.

*It's entirely possible that the stop light installation was scheduled and the teacher knew about it. I don't think it matters. The students learned and felt ownership over the actual processes for such petitions, and a lot of adults stepped in to teach them to how advocate for their needs in a democracy.

I've spent a lot of time in the past few weeks listening to political discourse about social class. There has been yet another news cycle of wealthy [male] consultants recruiting someone that they believed would appeal to [male] working-class voters, and then wealthy [mostly male] media figures were paid to analyze what happened when that campaign imploded.

It sometimes felt within the chaos as if informed discourse about social class and power --already so muddled – was set back decades.

So I returned to Daniel Laurison's recent research on lower voting participation rates among low-income voters, because in Laurison's work, people in poor and working-class communities are trusted to speak for themselves.

Laurison's HEARD (Healthy, Equitable, and Responsive Democracy) Center at Swarthmore conducted in-depth interviews with 144 diverse non-voting low-income people in Pennsylvania and we do well to listen to what these people say.

From Laurison:

The people in Laurison's study care deeply about their communities and could identify specific issues that are affected by politics. They did not see political decisions that made their lives better. Instead, they saw politics as a "game" in which candidates may briefly appear in election season but few politicians seem to care about them otherwise. They understood that they were speaking of a collective experience of politics, not simply their personal disengagement.

They see few people like themselves running for office or working for campaigns. Their perceptions are correct. Fewer than 2% of the members of state legislatures are from poor/working class backgrounds. Exponentially more federal office holders are millionaires than are from working-class backgrounds. Laurison's own work documents that campaign staff and consultants are overwhelmingly from privileged backgrounds. He cites research on how campaign volunteers are typically older, whiter, and wealthier than people in low-income communities and may misunderstand the priorities in those communities.

And thus, Laurison and his team recommend (among other excellent things) taking representation much more seriously:

Both social-class and racial representation help build trust and confidence. To help more people see themselves in politics and trust what they hear from people asking them to vote, organizations should seek to recruit and train volunteers, staff, and candidates from the same communities they are trying to mobilize, in terms of both race and social class.

First-Generation Students as Citizens

So what might the role of college be in supporting diverse volunteers, staff, and candidates from poor and working-class backgrounds to represent their communities in the hard work of democracy?

What if first-generation students were positioned to be part this work as they learn agentive ways to navigate the complicated social spaces between home and college as family members and also as citizens?

Obviously, colleges would be only part of this work, and on some campuses, initiatives like this would be treated with suspicion, but we have to imagine how things might be different.

So as part of imagining a more responsive politics, what if campaigns specifically recruited and trained first-gen* students as paid interns to engage with their home communities – as representatives with valuable knowledge of community concerns and valuable critique of solutions proposed by campaigns?

What if first-gen programming on campus included talks and workshops intended not only to inspire students to work hard but to also begin to learn how to leverage political power for their communities?

What if candidates and their staff were invited to forums on campuses organized with the help of first-generation students? Community colleges and public four-year colleges would seem to be logical sites to develop representation and voice, and forums could be live streamed into students' communities if they wished. What if privileged students then also witnessed people from under-represented communities speaking on their own behalf and holding people in power accountable for listening?

What if community-based learning courses on campuses engaged all students in building partnerships for field research in service of the political concerns of members of low-income communities ?

Because it seems too much of a burden to encourage first-gen graduates to uplift and inspire communities when community members sense, as Laurison documents, broader political indifference to their well-being.

What if we did any of these things instead of so often downplaying the structural inequalities that are sustained by that political indifference? Might we learn that we've been selling first-generation students short to assume that they care mainly about their own individual success? Or to assume that role model is the only powerful role that they might play in their community?

What if at least some of them would also also welcome learning to be part of building representation as campaign volunteers, staff, and candidates that could help to restore trust and confidence in politics that Laurison calls for?

Especially in this fraught political moment in which so many privileged people are arguing with each other about the political needs and priorities of poor and working-class people?

*Of course not all first-gen students are from low-income homes. I'm also fine with the relatively few higher-income first-gen students learning about the politics of social class representation and voice.

For a fair and comprehensive overview of the SAT admissions exam, take a look at Smithsonian Magazine's recent article on the 100-year history, the current state of research, and the cyclical policy debates around the exam.

We know also that scores on standardized tests like the SAT correlate with family wealth. We know that wealthier students take and retake the PSAT and the SAT with the help of prep courses and private tutors to maximize scores.

We also know that some colleges still require SAT scores in the hope that admissions decisions can more objective in surfacing talented students from underrepresented communities. Few colleges required the SAT for admissions during COVID. Multiple colleges are weighing whether to reinstate testing requirements, given the challenges of evaluating AI enhanced application essays and grade inflation in high schools.

The Educational Testing Service makes hundreds of thousands of dollars a year administering these testing operations. It would be fair to argue that have an interest in sustaining their roles as gatekeepers to college admissions. At the same time, the shrinking number of college-aged students in the US population also means that colleges will have to be open to a broader applicant pool than they once were if they are to sustain enrollment.

This would be a solid piece to assign in classes or to share with colleagues who are deliberating about admissions policies at the school and campus level.

The sample questions included in the article provide intriguing context for the discourse around what these tests do and do not measure.

If I were in charge, I'd have a session during first-year orientation in which I challenged all the students to ponder this graph of parental investment expenditures per child by income level:

In that orientation session at the very start of college, I'd ask students to reflect upon what it means the gaps in family spending on children's childcare, education, and organized activities have grown significantly between families in the highest income brackets and families at most other income levels.

The graph is from Orestes Hastings' new working paper "More Unequal Childhoods: 45 Years of Widening Income Gaps in Parental Investments in the United States". Using data from the 1980-2024 Consumer Expenditure Survey, Hastings documents that over those 45 years,

Per-child spending in the top decile nearly quadrupled in real terms, while bottom-quartile spending was slightly lower in 2024 than in 1980. Thus, the top decile spent roughly three times as much per child as the bottom quartile in the early 1980s but more than thirteen times as much by 2024.

I'd gently ask the first-year students to consider what this research means in how they'll understand themselves as members of this new community of students.

Elsewhere, they will learn about the diversity in religious beliefs, in political stances, in gender orientation, in race and ethnicities, in disabilities and the myriad other ways that peers will enrich their understanding of the world.

It seems important for them to also learn that some people in the room have benefitted from so much parental investment in their competitive advantages while others parents have been able to provide much less.

These seem to be important conversations at the start of college because as is the case with every dimension of difference, they are questions about who has the power to judge and who will be judged. They're questions about responsibility for learning about the circumstances of others' lives, about responsibility for your own actions, about who we'll all become as citizens.

They are questions about the assumptions students may have made about "deserving" and "undeserving".

They are questions about the very meaning of being educated about the circumstances of our own lives. And they are conversations too rarely had on campuses.

I would be clear that privileged guilt was the very last thing that I intended in showing this graph. This chart is about parent choices and parent capacity, not anything that first-year students have done.

I would be even more clear that less privileged students should feel no shame when these difference in personal resources become evident in the dailiness of campus life.

My strong belief is that discovering these gaps shouldn't be casual or accidental for poor and working-class students, as they so often now are. Students shouldn't be left alone to learn that a lot of them have entered a race long after others left the gate, especially since they'd been promised for years that education is the great equalizer.

When looking at this chart, I might also ask what these parents fear when spending this much more on own children than parents were spending a short time ago, and why those fears have become the problem of others in their children's first-year class. I'd ask why the norm on campuses is to protect those privileged students by rarely talking about increasingly unequal childhoods, even when that means that other students blame themselves for not measuring up. I may not ask those particular questions out loud at orientation, but those questions are an entry point to analyses of the broader contexts of social and educational inequality and zero-sum beliefs about opportunity.

I'd hope that privileged students might leave that session a bit more humble about what they may understand as their relative innate merit. I'd hope that poor and working-class students might leave the session more willing to name unearned privilege and to speak up when they're being judged for the artifacts of structural inequalities that benefit those who hold the power to judge.

Mostly, I'd hope that after that first orientation session, all students would ask their professors and staff a lot more about all of this in their classes, because currently, there's so little talk about social class and economic inequalities within the student body (and within the faculty). I'd hope that students from poor and working-class backgrounds would question why first-gen support programs instead downplay differences between themselves and their peers.

Perhaps, planning that kind of an orientation session is part of why I've never, ever been put in charge.

But I can still dream.

For reference, the upper limits of household quintiles (a slightly different measure than the quartiles and deciles used in this paper but the data indicate how many households are living on relatively low incomes):

In 2024, households in the lowest quintile had incomes of $34,510 or less. Households in the second quintile had incomes as high as $65,100, those in the third quintile had incomes as high as $105,500, and those in the fourth quintile had incomes as high as $175,700. Households in the highest quintile had incomes higher than $175,700. The top 5 percent of households in the income distribution had incomes of $335,700 or higher.

It's my experience that students raised within relatively higher incomes assume that they're relatively poor because they're aware of the very wealthy, and that it's very educational for them to learn how so many families raise children with much less.

When I was part of the team building a new campus of my state's flagship university, we talked a great deal about our students who were parents.

State funding formulas based on scale meant that it would be decades before we could actually provide on-campus care. And we knew that our students who were parents would struggle to stay in school without high quality childcare.

There were so many state building formulas that assumed conventional, residential students, not the population of first-gen and non-traditional-aged students that we actually served. Eighteen percent of all undergraduates are parents; on our campus, the percentage was much higher when we opened.

We scheduled longer class sessions that met only two days a week instead of the standard three-days-a-week schedule so that students could pay for fewer days of childcare and better schedule their jobs. When the state insisted that we schedule our classroom five days a week for maximum "utilization" of space, we pointed to how many classes met late into the evenings four days a week, when classrooms on other campuses were empty.

We argued for more parking spaces than the state formula allowed, knowing that public transportation could not work for students who did daily circuits of childcare dropoff, classes, jobs off campus, childcare pickup, and then evening classes while older siblings cared for the little ones because so few childcares stayed open after 6:00.

We knew that all of this was little more than a bandaid for students who needed reliable, affordable childcare to stay in school.

And we also knew that children's wellbeing should never depend upon such piecemeal peripheral gestures.

Thus, it's been encouraging to follow the development of universal childcare in New Mexico. The state has committed to funding a range of childcare options (home care, childcare centers, religious settings, after school programs, and others) for children from birth to age 13, regardless of family income.

In New Mexico, family income no longer determines which children watch movies on a parents' phone in the back of college classrooms when parents can't afford alternatives, and which children can settle into quality childcare for the day.

Unlike the market-driven childcare in other states, childcare workers in New Mexico earn higher wages and may qualify for benefits, because a stable workforce is also essential for quality childcare and because the work is of such high social value.

No childcare provider in New Mexico is required to accept children participating in the state project, so wealthier parents are still assured of access to places that will enroll children only like their own.

Yet statewide universal childcare is a solid, basic gesture toward equity. I'm hoping that more states are watching.

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 to access 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?