Longitudinal Study Describes First-Generation College Students

First in My Family: A Profile of First-Generation College Students at Four-Year Institutions Since 1971, released in May 2007 by the Higher Education Research Institute, describes some of the characteristics and motivations of those students who are the first in their immediate families to pursue a college education. Hoping to improve how institutions serve first-generation student populations, the longitudinal study investigated the ways in which this student group has changed in thirty-five years in areas such as demographics, preparation for college, college-going motivations, and financial concerns.

Data were drawn from the Cooperative Institutional Research Program’s Freshman Survey, taken annually since 1966 and representing the longest-running study of American higher education. Today’s first-generation students are motivated to pursue higher education, encouraged by their families to do so, interested in both obtaining high-paying jobs after college and preparing for graduate study, concerned about financing their educations, and self-conscious about their own academic and social preparedness for college.

While both first-generation students and those with college-educated parents are attending college in higher numbers today than in years past, the gaps between these two groups of students have not closed in many significant areas over the last thirty-five years. Students with college-educated parents have remained consistently ahead of their first-generation peers in enrollment, intellectual confidence, math and writing ability, SAT scores, and many other areas.

FINDINGS

Demographics

• There has been a steady decline in the percentage of first-time, full-time college first-year students whose parents received no postsecondary education. This statistic reflects an overall increase in the level of education among the American population as a whole.
• In 2005, first-generation students represented 18 percent of the full-time freshman student body at public institutions and 13 percent of the student body at private institutions.
• As a group, African Americans students show the greatest decline in their representation of first-generation college students—a declining rate that is of concern because it is faster than the relative proportion of African American adults without a college education as well as being greater than the decline of first-generation students in other racial/ethnic groups.

Motivations

• Parental encouragement was rated as a “very important” motivation for attending college by 47 percent of first-generation students in 2005—up from 21 percent in 1971. This finding contradicts the widely held belief that having non-college-educated parents is a deterrent to enrollment in a postsecondary institution.
• First-generation college students are much more likely to rely on advice from their high school guidance counselor when deciding which college to attend. 11.4 percent cite the advice of high school guidance counselors as a very important reason for choosing a particular college, compared to 7.2 percent of non-first-generation students.
• “To be able to make more money” remains an important college-going motivation for first-generation students (cited by 77 percent), though it is also a chief motivator for their non-first-generation peers (cited by 70 percent).
• Preparation for graduate school was cited by more than half (58 percent) of first-generation students in 2005 as an important reason for college attendance.

Financial Concerns

• First-generation students are more than twice as likely as their peers (23 percent versus 11 percent) to cite having “major concerns” about financing college.
• More than half of first-generation students expect that they will need a job to pay for college expenses (55 percent), compared to only 45 percent of their peers.

Academic Preparation

• First-generation students consistently had lower high school grades and scored lower on the SAT than their peers every year data were gathered.
• Despite rating their own abilities in reading and math lower than their peers’ self-ratings, first-generation students’ academic confidence (their expectation to earn at least a B average in college) increased by 32 percentage points between 1971 and 2005.

The executive summary of First in My Family (pdf) is available from HERI's Web site.

DID YOU KNOW?

• Hispanic students represent the largest proportion of first-generation students at four-year colleges (38 percent); 69 percent of Hispanic adults lacked a college education in 2005.
• More than half of the first-generation students (55 percent) surveyed in 2005 reported that a school’s strong academic reputation was a “very important” reason for choosing it as their college. 
• First-generation students are considerably less likely to live on campus (70 percent versus 85 percent of their peers), even though campus residence is correlated with desirable academic and social outcomes.