Opening The Door

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The experience and reality of first-generation college students

Written by Kora Quinn, Culture Staff Writer and Illustrated by Emma Gray, Assistant Arts Curator

For many first-generation college students, there is an excitement that comes with breaking the mold and entering the world of higher education. It’s a sense of pride, a feeling that you’re making your family proud and setting an example for those around you. Yet, despite the thrill, there are also many challenges unique to being the first in your family to attend college and even more keeping you from getting there in the first place.

While it’s a new, transitional process for everyone, the first major difference first-generation students face is simply that there’s no parental figure with specific guidance or experience. Many first-generation students are unaware of resources and services on campus, their journey is largely walked alone. Speaking from experiences you have to figure nearly everything out by yourself. The biggest consequence of this is a lack of college readiness, which goes beyond just being academically prepared. Many first-generation students, including myself, didn’t even know how the system worked prior to being immersed in it.

What qualifies as a good school, where should I live, how will I pay for this, what even is the difference between a B.A. and a B.S. — though simple, these are all questions I had just before entering my freshman year, and they are all questions I felt I had to answer on my own. It was isolating to be the student who didn’t know what Greek life was, who didn’t know you needed an internship to get a job. Socially and structurally, college is a foreign world for many first-generation students.

Beyond that, the average family income for first-generation freshmen is around $37,000, compared to an average income of just under $100,000 for continuing generation freshmen (PNPI, 2020). Furthermore, 27% of first generations students come from families making $20,000 or less a year. Compared to the average cost of tuition in America for a public, four-year university — at around $25,000 a year — the cost of higher education becomes daunting (Bustamante, 2019).

Since so many first-generation students come from low-income households, they are more likely to be financially independent of their parents when it comes to paying for tuition, housing, dining, books and supplies. Thus, most rely on receiving large scholarships, good financial aid and finding employment to pay their way through university. Not only does this create additional stress and anxiety for students, but in my experience, it can also create a feeling of inadequacy as if you don’t deserve to be there because you have to work so much harder. While that is, of course, false, it also begs the question: what is the context for why so many first-generation students come from low-income families in the first place?

There are numerous reasons why low-income families are less likely to pursue an education, the largest factor being generational poverty and its side effects. When two or more generations of your family are born into poverty, it takes a lot of effort to escape it. Education, as stated prior, is expensive. Child care so the parent(s) can work or go to school is expensive, state aid is inconsistent and not always guaranteed, children occasionally have to exchange high school for work to help their family and those in poverty often suffer from depression, anxiety and emotional trauma as a product of the environment in which they were raised. All of these factors make it difficult to escape poverty in the first place, let alone motivate or push children to seek or desire an education.

Additionally, low-income children who do seek education may have to rely on scholarships and financial aid heavily, as stated prior. Yet on average, children in poverty are behind in academics, are more prone to behavioral and emotional problems and are at a higher risk for physical health problems (Elliott, 2020). Because of this having access to the resources intended to help, like scholarships, is not as easy or they don’t fit the necessary academic or community requirements.

It’s evident that being a first-generation college student is a challenge in the first place, but when considering the systems and structures that prohibit or deter them from getting in the door it becomes clear that being a first-generation student is not the only part of the problem. Not only must schools and institutions support and aid students who are in attendance at their programs they must also make strides towards helping first-generation college students get there.

First-generation students deserve to be there and deserve to celebrated and supported. The experiences of first-generation college students put them in a position where they may struggle both before and during their college experience. But those experiences are valid and important for creating a diverse pool of students from all backgrounds. In order to enable these students and support them, we must address the systems that hold them back and lift them up to success while they complete their education.

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