I’ve got a few questions for you. First, what is a vice provost? Can you name one? Second, in terms of majors and minors, what is the difference between a department and a program? Third, what GPA do you need to have to remain in good academic standing, and how many terms can you fail to meet that benchmark before you risk being disqualified?
Do you know the answer to all of those questions? One last one: Did your primary caregivers graduate from college?
At IntroDUCKtion, I remember my Student Orientation Staff member telling me how overwhelming the first few weeks of freshman year can feel. There’s so much to see and do that you just can’t process it all. So when freshman year started and I felt overwhelmed, I assumed it was part of the process. When I didn’t get less overwhelmed as we rolled into winter, I assumed everyone else was in the same boat. As bills came and debt mounted, and as I started making plans to drop out, I assumed other people were doing the same. Then, halfway through spring term, while reading a pamphlet for the TRiO programs in FIG Assistant training class, I realized I was a first-generation college student.
Honestly, the term didn’t mean anything to me, besides that I met basic eligibility for two programs offered through the Teaching and Learning Center. My sophomore year, I noticed a behavioral difference between my FIG students. Some of them would call home and talk about their classes, ask for advice on papers and get reminders from Mom and/or Dad about meeting with advisers and registering for classes; others wouldn’t. They would either do all those things themselves, they would ask me or they would forget. This behavioral difference had strong correlation to another difference between my students: A vast majority of the students who seemed to receive little guidance from home were first-generation college students.
I know from my own experience that my family has always supported me the best they can. But I also know that if I called my mother to ask for help in choosing classes, the conversation would quickly become an Abbott and Costello routine. It wasn’t something that caused me anxiety; it was just a reality.@@http://www.abbottandcostello.net/@@
Of course, there is another way of viewing my reality. What I tacitly accepted as normalcy, French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu described as a symptom of a system that “(proportions) academic success to the amount of cultural capital bequeathed by the family.” @@Bourdieu, “Cultural Reproduction and Social Reproduction”@@
In “Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses,” released early this year to significant press attention, sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa analyzed so much data that my Latinist’s mind reeled. Their conclusions, however, could not have been clearer. Aside from their claims about academic rigor, Arum and Roksa found that colleges in the U.S., regardless of public/private designation, region, selectivity or campus profile, preserved educational inequalities between first-generation college students and their counterparts from better-educated families. @@Arum and Roksa, Academically Adrift, pg. 38@@
Put another way, first-generation college students did worse on the benchmark test discussed in “Academically Adrift” than children of parents who had bachelor’s degrees or better. After two years in college, both groups improved roughly the same amount, so that the first-generation college students were still behind.
I’ve asked a lot of people at the University about first-generation students. Some of them basically declined to answer when I asked how many students here had parents without college degrees. Others told me they weren’t sure anyone knew. Every person, however, made reference to one of the many organizations on campus that help support underrepresented students. I knew about all of those resources and the important role that they play. I also knew I had only heard of them because of my job.
Maybe someone has hard data about first-generation students, and I just missed the needle while sifting through the hay. I realized, though, that even if the numbers have been collected, it doesn’t really matter. If I wasn’t professionally obligated to familiarize myself with campus resources, I would have graduated totally ignorant of the impact my identity as a first-generation student has had on my college experience. I would have assumed I was normal, even though the data suggests something quite different.
My last question: If first-generation students on our campus don’t even know they’re first-generation, how serious can this institution really be about educational equality? Don’t worry; that’s rhetorical.