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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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".
- 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.
