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In the voices of those who are living the hard path toward the diploma, this book sets out step-by-step advice for those who will follow. Not just new students but college access professionals, student affairs personnel, admissions officers, and pre-college students of any age have much to learn from the journey of struggle and persistence they describe.

These students did not have family who went before them, to predict or explain the rude shocks that would greet them. We see the wave of economic privilege confront Eric Polk, fresh from the streets of East Nashville, and the literature professor at his elite college who assumes Eric will speak for all African-Americans when the class reads Huckleberry Finn. We share Jackie Comminello’s unhappy realization that her Denver neighborhood’s under-resourced high school had not equipped her to take the rigorous science and math courses she needs to become an orthodontist someday. We flinch at the reality that Raja Fattah has to work full time at a gas-station market, just to meet his expenses at Kent State. We witness the efforts of Debra Graves, a sixth-grade dropout, raising four young boys while she takes community-college classes to secure their future.

“As a society, we are producing more students who are at risk of not completing college,” says John Gardner, who heads the Policy Center on the First Year of College, located in Brevard, North Carolina. “If we want a more educated citizenry, then we must provide them with certain kinds of support.” American colleges have long attended to that task, for example by launching what are known as first-year seminars starting in the 1880s, he observes. Now, 94 percent of all accredited U.S. colleges offer some sort of course that teaches students “how to do college.”

First in the Family renders this crucial support human and accessible, Dr. Gardner notes. “These students give very solid advice,” he says, “treating the affective elements of the transition to college, and balancing that very well with its academic elements. Above all, they emphasize the importance of the people in their environment—both on campus and at home—as elements of their success.”

With a mix of encouragement and pragmatism, the student contributors lay out tips and tools, from planning a course pathway to connecting with professors. They speak of culture shock and loneliness, and of how to reach beyond it. “The first day of class, I pass around my notebook and ask my classmates for their names, phone numbers, and e-mails,” says Debra, the mother of four. “I’ll send out a mass e-mail before a big test and ask, ‘Does anybody want to get together a study group?’”

They talk about friends and family they left behind. “I remember coming back and just seeing things so differently,” says Milenny, who left her immigrant New York neighborhood for a women’s college in suburban Massachusetts. “But my family haven’t changed in the way they want me to be. They don’t want me to go out, they don’t want me to go far.”

They bluntly describe financial stress. “I wouldn’t recommend working full time and taking a full course load,” says Raja. “It’s probably twice as hard. If you’re going to have to miss class to go to work, I suggest getting a loan instead, because you won’t learn anything that way.”

First-generation students face formidable odds. In his research on college attrition, Dr. Vincent Tinto of Syracuse University describes the factors that cause so many to leave before graduation, and typically before the start of the second year. In addition to the challenge of academic work, students face an array of social, cultural, and economic pressures that can make or break their college experience.

“Access without support is not opportunity,” Dr. Tinto says. “In order to navigate the new world of college, students need a supportive community of faculty and staff and peers. First-generation college students especially face daily challenges—how to approach a faculty member, for example—to which they bring very little prior knowledge.” For that reason, Dr. Tinto urges colleges to create “learning communities” in which first-generation college students form bonds of support and interdependence with peers, faculty, and staff.

First in the Family: Your College Years offers help in breaking such challenges into manageable tasks. Every chapter includes a worksheet that asks students to write down their resources and organize their next steps. Academic help, time management, relationships with professors, choosing a major, stress relief—these are the building blocks of the college diploma. The hard-won insights in First in the Family—rendered in the first person singular—will enlighten not just first-generation students, but any college student who faces an abrupt adjustment to expectations built by the allure of an admissions office brochure.

Research and publication of First in the Family: Your College Years was made possible by support from Lumina Foundation for Education. The book is available through online booksellers; for quantity discounts, contact info@nextgenerationpress.org.

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First-generation students

Researchers have found that students from homes where neither parent had earned a bachelor’s degree are about twice as likely as those with a college-educated parent to leave before their second year (23 percent vs. 10 percent).

Such students are likely to enter college not as well prepared academically as their peers who have college-educated parents. They also have limited information about the college experience (including how to finance it) and are less likely to receive informal family support in coping with problems.

Although first-generation status is an important predictor of success in postsecondary education, rigorous preparation in high school substantially narrows the gap in postsecondary outcomes between first-generation students and their peers whose parents graduated from college. For more information about factors that influence student success, read the National Center for Education Statistics report Bridging the Gap and Lumina’s Focus magazine Refuse to Lose.