How Can We Better Serve First-Generation College Students?

Andrew Carnegie Fellow Marcia Chatelain calls for innovative and inclusive ways to teach and support first-generation students across the U.S.

By Joanne Omang August 10, 2023

Students and others gather at Harvard University to rally in support of affirmative action after the Supreme Court ruling on July 1, 2023. The Supreme Court's landmark decision made it unlawful for colleges to take race into consideration as a specific factor in admissions. (Credit: Scott Eisen via Getty Images)

History professor and Andrew Carnegie Fellow Marcia Chatelain wants colleges and universities to normalize access for first-generation and minority students as firmly as they have normalized football.

“College presidents and provosts have to say that access is a nonnegotiable,” the Pulitzer Prize–winning author told Carnegie Corporation of New York staff in April. “In the same ways that football is a nonnegotiable, access has to be nonnegotiable.”

Beyond admission and financial assistance, access requires a “wraparound” approach to ensure that first-generation and minority students are helped to cope with the “hidden curriculum,” or culture of academia, that invisibly governs achievement. “Exposing and deconstructing that curriculum can be helpful for our students,” said Chatelain, a professor of history and African American studies at Georgetown University. “All the rules are not clearly articulated.”

An Andrew Carnegie Fellow in 2019, Chatelain spoke to the Corporation about her fellowship project, “First-Generation Future: A History of First-Generation College Students and How to Better Serve Them Now.” Chatelain’s second book, Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America, which looked at the post-1968 civil rights movement in the context of the fast-food industry, was awarded the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in History.

Chatelain talked about having collaborated with Georgetown’s Scholars Program on the creation of a credit-bearing course called “Mastering the Hidden Curriculum” for students who identify as first-generation college students or low-income students and their allies. The course involved asking such questions as, “How does cultural capital work in an environment where just doing well in your classes sometimes does not seem enough? How do we encourage students to engage in effective communication and self-advocacy? How do they navigate resources? How does the role of race and power and privilege inform their experiences on campus?”

A first-generation student is often a proxy for a low-income student or student of color, even though that is not necessarily accurate, says Chatelain. Many first-generation students are 25 or older, and many are parents themselves. The U.S. Department of Education defines first-generation students as students coming from households where parents or guardians did not complete a college degree. Colleges have been wrong, Chatelain said, to assume that preferential admissions and adequate financing are enough to get first-generation students to graduation.

“An insight that I came to after years of advising and mentoring first-generation college students who had the big scholarships to attend, and who had the excitement and enthusiasm of family and community, is that the reality of college completion creates a new set of variables in thinking about the work that we do on campuses,” Chatelain said. “Opportunity is not stability. The turn toward college access has assumed that the greatest barrier to college completion has been financial, and that if you have a student who is academically able to attend your institution, then there should be success if they don’t have to worry about paying for it.”

This old model of a financial aid–forward approach relies on scholarships and grants. The new model moves toward wraparound approaches that recognize challenges specific to degree completion: the financial contributions to families and communities of origins that first-generation students have when they attend college; academic preparedness that is often linked to income; disruptions caused by a loss of housing or income, or illness due to COVID-19; and a lack of health care or employment, among others.

Speaking prior to the Supreme Court ruling in June that ended race-based affirmative action programs, Chatelain already saw higher education moving away from it. “I think affirmative action no longer matters,” Chatelain said. “We're already there.” Programs designed in the 1970s and ’80s for “minorities” became “diversity” programs and then “multicultural” ones open to everybody. Equating admission to an “elite school” with proof of merit was “a great myth,” Chatelain said, that died with the pay-for-entry scandal known as Operation Varsity Blues. “We need to talk differently about the ways we see merit,” Chatelain said.

Higher education institutions need to offer discretionary financial aid programs that cover not just tuition and fees but also things like winter coats, dorm room furniture, preventive health care, childcare, and emergency trips home, said Chatelain. Additional barriers to college completion involve holding transcripts hostage because of unpaid fees when students transfer or must take time away. College officials must also intervene to protect first generation students from predatory for-profit schools or loan programs that require payments even if degrees are never earned.

Private foundations and donors must insist on commitments from higher education institutions to retain first-generation students. More research is also needed on how race, ethnicity, and citizenship status create inequality in outcomes among majority and minority second-generation students. Even when first-generation students earn degrees, Chatelain said, there are still inequalities in income and financial stability because of the ways that race and income inequality are connected.

“Dramatic stories of students who move from the D.C. central homeless shelter into a college dorm room are heartening, and they bring attention to the need for college access, but what happens at the end of that four year process?” asked Chatelain. “In a lot of my research, I’m trying to think about this idea of higher education seeing itself as a force for good, as a place that essentially atones for the elitism and the bad acts of the past — and particularly how the shifts in 1968, not just in higher education but in the philanthropy world, really opened up a space for a new population of students to come to college campuses and to transform the culture. What if we imagine that each and every one of our students had to confront those same obstacles? How would this change and inform the way that we introduce students to the college experience, how we teach them, and how we support them? For all of its problems and all of its challenges, I still really believe that higher education is in the service of the common good.”

Joanne Omang is a former reporter, foreign correspondent, and editor for the Washington Post, who now does editing, consulting, and ghostwriting for selected nonprofit groups. She was the Post’s first woman foreign correspondent, reporting from Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s and on the State Department and foreign policy issues after that.