Giving Compass' Take:

• Universities should implement more support systems for first-generation graduate students so that they can thrive in school and beyond. 

• How would these types of support systems help universities move towards equity in higher education?

• Read about the role of college counselors in assisting first-generation students. 

Amy King was the first in her family to go to college, and she experienced firsthand the challenges of being a first-generation undergraduate. But when she got to graduate school, she found the adjustment even more difficult.

King is now a licensed psychologist, but she still remembers how hard it was to explain to her family things that everyone else around her seemed to take for granted. “For instance, they didn’t understand the internship process or why I wasn’t getting paid yet,” she says. “That causes some psychological distress. When you think, ‘Gosh, the important people in my life don’t really get it, and they aren’t able to appreciate it in the same way.’”

Meanwhile, she felt that professors and others around her assumed that because she made it through an undergraduate degree, she must have it all figured out. But there are “subtle barriers” that first-generation grad students face, she adds, because they don’t have role models and people to go to for advice and answers about the process.

King ended up writing her doctoral paper on the challenges faced by first-generation graduate students in professional psychology, which argues that universities should do more to recognize and support these students. It cites research that shows that while first-generation college students are just as likely as other students to aspire to grad school, they are less likely to earn graduate degrees.

Among the specific changes that King recommends are:

  • Identify first-generation students at admission so that interventions can be targeted early.
  • Help students build professional networks and provide mentorship and advising.
  • Offer additional financial aid to first-generation students to help encourage more students from different social and ethnic backgrounds to attend.
  • Provide multicultural training to faculty “which includes current literature and research related to first-generation students as an underrepresented group.

Read the full article about first-generation university students by Jeffrey R. Young at EdSurge.