Study of College Transcripts Confirms Challenges Facing First-Generation Students

Research into “first-generation students”—students who are the first in their families to attend college—shows that they face disadvantages in terms of preparation, access, persistence, and degree attainment. A recent study from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), First-Generation Students in Postsecondary Education: A Look at Their Transcripts, provides new insight into these disadvantages by tracking students’ course-taking habits and academic achievement.

First-Generation Students in Postsecondary Education analyses a subset of students who were twelfth-graders in 1992, following their educational progress over the following eight years and examining their college transcripts. The report’s findings provide a sobering picture of the difficulties that first-generation students face: compared with students whose parents attended college, first-generation students require more remediation, have lower grade point averages, take fewer academic courses, earn fewer credits, and are less likely to earn degrees.

FINDINGS

Attainment and Persistence

1. Forty-three percent of first-generation students who graduated from high school in 1992 and entered postsecondary education between 1992 and 2000 left without earning a degree by 2000, while 24 percent graduated with a bachelor’s degree; by contrast, 68 percent of students with college-educated parents graduated and only 20 percent left without a degree.
2. First-generation students had lower first-year grade point averages (2.5 versus 2.8) than those whose parents were college graduates, and this lower performance continued throughout their undergraduate years.
3. First-generation students were less likely than students with college-educated parents to earn a bachelor’s degree, even after taking into account factors such as students’ demographic backgrounds, academic preparation, enrollment characteristics, credit production, and performance.
4. First-generation students were more likely than students with college-educated parents to persist in postsecondary education, but this difference disappeared after controlling for related factors such as family income, education expectations, type of first institution, time between high school graduation and enrollment, and enrollment status.

Course-Taking Experience

• Fifty-five percent of first-generation students took some remedial courses during their college years, compared with 27 percent of students whose parents held a bachelor’s or advanced degree.
• First-generation students earned an average of eighteen credits in their first year of college, compared with twenty-five credits earned by students whose parents had a bachelor’s or advanced degree; first-generation students continued to lag behind their peers in credit accumulation throughout their college careers.
• First-generation students preferred vocational and technical fields over academic ones, and were less likely than students whose parents were college graduates to take courses in mathematics, science, computer science, social studies, humanities, history, and foreign languages.

To learn more about First-Generation Students in Postsecondary Education or to download a copy of the full report, visit NCES online.

AAC&U is a lead partner in the Pathways to College Network, a network of organizations and foundations promoting college access and success for underserved students, including first-generation students. For more information about this project, see AAC&U’s Pathways to College Network page.

DID YOU KNOW?

• First-generation students are less likely than their peers to attend college within eight years of high school graduation, and are more likely to delay postsecondary entry, begin at a two-year institution, and attend part-time and discontinuously.
• First-generation students are more likely than their peers to be black or Hispanic and to come from low-income families.
• Compared with students with college-educated parents, first-generation students have lower senior achievement test scores and lower college entrance examination scores