Research

Trying to help a high school senior get into his dream school, Laurie Kopp Weingarten called the college to emphasize that the boy should be able to lay claim to the latest, and fuzziest, of all admissions hooks: being a first-generation student.

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Updating a prior report on first-generation students (Nunez and Cuccaro-Alamin 1998) and complementing a recent report on first-generation students who were high school sophomores in 2002 (Redford and Hoyer 2017), this Statistics in Brief focuses on first-generation students’ entrance into postsecondary education, persistence and completion once they enroll in college, labor market outcomes, and further education enrollment and attainment after bachelor’s degree completion. In this report, first-generation students are defined as undergraduate students whose parents had not participated in postsecondary education. The experiences and outcomes of these students are compared with those of two groups whose parents had attended college, sometimes referred to as continuing-generation students in this report: students with at least one parent who earned a bachelor’s degree and students with at least one parent who attended college but no parent who had earned a bachelor’s degree.

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According to Gentry Patrick, you could not have predicted he would become a professor.

“In part because my mom had me at 16 years old,” Patrick said. “I grew up in inner-city, South Central (Los Angeles). I was the first to go to college in my family. Nobody knew about science.”

Patrick is now a full professor and neurobiologist in UC San Diego’s Division of Biological Sciences. His lab studies how the brain turns over proteins that are no longer needed, and how that process is linked to diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

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Key Findings:

Experiences of finding a sense of belonging on campus differ for first-generation students and continuing-generation students.

Universities’ organizational approach to understanding the dynamics of belonging is flawed.

Faculty to can facilitate academic and social belonging.

Click here to view the full powerpoint report from University of San Diego's Dr. Lisa Nunn.

Throughout high school and now in college, I have been told I am “lucky.” I can’t help but feel confused as to why I would be labeled lucky when that’s not even my situation.

Here’s four reasons why saying “you’re lucky” is a problem.

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