Often, I see authors in the first-generation student literature making the curious argument that talking about the structural inequalities shaping the childhoods of diverse students from poor and working-class backgrounds is "deficit" thinking.
This is curious to me because for decades, a line of research claimed that poor peoples' personal and cultural deficits explained their poverty: low-income parents supposedly used a more limited vocabulary with their children, lacked ambition, failed to be supportive of their children's schooling, or just lived morally suspect lives. That "deficit" thinking is the basis for much conservative policy: people are blamed for their own circumstances because our country has ample opportunity
Cutting social safety nets is framed within these perspectives as the nudge that poor people need to become more responsible as parents and community members.
This decades-long line of "deficit thinking" is exactly the opposite of the current studies that document how poor communities get less school funding, have less access to fresh food or medical care near their homes, have punitive rather than supportive systems for social safety nets, have schools that offer little information about going to college, and often have crumbling infrastructure – all of which are public policy made by more powerful actors.
So it's curious for advocates for first-generation students to suggest that studies of unequal access to the resources needed for college are "deficit" thinking and that studies of structural inequalities should be countered by focusing on students' "assets" such as resilience and strong social ties within their communities.
For example, last week I read this piece that discusses how many faculty and staff may not be familiar with rural communities and therefore underestimate rural students. True. And the literature review and analysis are grounded in the idea that to study and report on how rural students are often denied resources such as technology and highly qualified teachers is to put too much emphasis on rural students' "deficits". Instead, these authors argue, we need to focus on "assets" of these students such as familiarity with nature and the capacity for finding community on campus.
The authors of this piece claim the language of critical scholarship to speak of policy and practice "minoritizing and marginalizing" rural students, but the examples of "minoritizing and marginalizing" are more individual: some faculty and peers' stereotype about rural life [and in these interviews, are quickly educated by rural students].
This study of rural students is based on a survey and two interviews (six months apart) with 9 students and a single interview with 2 students. Only six of the 11 were first-generation students, suggesting a conflation of living in a "rural" area with marginalization. The diverse students were scattered around the country and at various points in their education. In the two 45-90 minute interviews the students
1) defined rurality; 2) described their rural hometowns, schools, and families; 3) experienced higher education as rural students; 4) defined and understood their rural-centric strengths; and 5) felt their institutions did or did not support students who identified as rural.
There seemed to be no probing by interviewers about the quality of the students' K-12 schools or other resource disparities, though the literature review details how many people rural communities cannot access resources that others take for granted.
In the end, the 11 students in this paper – all of whom self-selected – are all doing pretty well in college as they leveraged their distinctive assets as rural students to (relatively easily) overcome others' ignorance about rural life and to find supportive social groups and even assume leadership roles.
The authors state, clearly, that the paper was intended to provide "asset-based considerations" for how rural students do well in college in spite of barriers they might face. The argument really does seem to be that the barriers are just not that significant in the lives of these students.
Last week, I also read Sophia Rodriquez's ten-year case study of two young Latina women, one with and one without DACA. Their many strengths ("assets" if you will) are evident on every page, and still, the article is rich in analysis of the power that others hold over these young people and their communities and the ways in which race, social class, gender, and immigration status create "hidden injuries" that these young women must navigate as they try to build their lives as educated young adults. Rodriquez's work contextualizes campus experiences (and academic success) within the broader frayed social fabric within these young women were educated:
I illustrate three major themes in the findings section below: school/life transitions, i.e. where youth experience the impact of their status in relation to financial barriers, fears of deportation, and family separation; tensions between aspirations and familial relations, i.e. the social class disparities they experience, and the complexity of the Latino-x category, what I refer to as race-related stressors an events, including episodes of how they are positioned as undeserving immigrants and how their Latino immigrant identity is race-d and racialised. Each of these three themes represent the manifestation of the sources of injury and then how youth react to them.
Rodriquez first met the young women as high school students. She maintained contacts with them through college and into graduate school/work, advocating for them, introducing them to resources they might otherwise not have known about, and listening to them as they navigated life transitions. She then interviewed them again multiple times for this paper, doing extensive life history interviews over extended sessions. She introduced them to each other and interviewed them together, facilitating long conversations between them. As she wrote, she did "member checks" with each of them, inviting them to confirm or correct her understanding. The young women were offered co-authorship of this paper, but because of their status, declined to be identified.
They are strong. They are also clear about the injustice that required this much strength from them. We are invited to admire them and also to question our own roles as citizens and academics who can work for justice for young people like them.
I have every confidence that the rural students in the first study, speaking to relative strangers, answered the questions that the research team asked as these students understood the questions. I can also wonder why different questions seem not to have been asked about the students' experiences of any of the inequalities documented in the authors' literature review.
Merely asking students about social class inequalities in their lives is tricky. It makes sense that when told from childhood that in a meritocracy, hard work in school and talent are rewarded, students finding their way in college would speak in scholarly interviews about their hard work and their unique strengths.
Yet we know that most students have very little opportunity to analyze social class inequalities anywhere in their schooling. They learn not to talk about their own class backgrounds. They hear over and over that their own resilience overcomes hardships.
In contrast, by the time of their life-history interviews, the young women in Rodriquez' paper have access to broader public discourse about immigration, gender, and the diversity of Latinx experiences. They've navigated multiple life transitions and can reflect on the promises of the "American dream".
In contrast, many first-generation students may first realize the depths of social-class inequalities in casual conversations with more privileged peers in class and dorms. They are unlikely to learn anywhere on campus or the broader culture about how to understand those disparities beyond a sense that maybe their families actually did manifest personal "deficits" that explain their economic struggle.
Reading these articles together, I want to think more deeply about how we tap students' embodied knowledge of class inequalities when they hear so many messages that doing well in school erases disadvantage.
I wonder why we don't have much more research that centers students' growth, change, frustration, success, disillusionment, questions, and insight over time. I want a scholarly imagination that produces much better than point-in-time interviews when first-generation students are experiencing so many major life transitions, not the least of which is crossing contested social class borders.
I want research that gives first-generation students credit for changing and growing and questioning every year, not research that frames any interview at any given point in time as the sum of their wisdom.
Student support staff and faculty training student support staff – the authors of most of the research in these first-gen journals– seem ideally positioned to develop the long-term relationships with students from orientation through at least graduation, and to build an understanding of how students navigate the very complicated transitions to and though college as poor and working-class students.
Of course we should listen to them speak of their strengths.
Yet the rural student article is yet another in the first-generation literature that cites Tara Yosso as advocating for a focus on "assets" that students possess when they arrive at college. And it's yet another article that skips past Yosso's extensive writing about the pain and injustice within which young people are required to build resistance and strength, as if oppression is actually a positive force in young peoples' lives.
I am not clear why this first-generation literature so seldom asks students to also speak of childhoods in which so much time is invested in navigating barriers held firmly in place by public policy and indifference.
It's one thing to focus on the strengths that students built while living within adversity, but I'm not clear how it's a credit to those strengths to diminish the depths of that adversity.
