Ana Barros grew up in a two-family house built by Habitat for Humanity, hard by the boarded-up buildings and vacant lots of Newark, New Jersey. Neither of her parents attended college, but she was a star student. With a 2200 on her SATs, she expected to fit in at Harvard.
Yet here she was at a lecture for a sociology course called, paradoxically, "Poverty in America", when a classmate opened her laptop and planned a multi-country spring break trip to Europe. (Barros can't afford textbooks; she borrows from the library.)
On the sidewalks of Cambridge, Massachusetts, students brush past her in their $700 Canada Goose parkas and $1,000 Moncler puffer jackets. (Barros saved up for two years for good boots.) On an elite campus, income inequality can be in your face.
A professor once described how hardships become inscribed on one's body, and Barros thought of her father, a janitor at a home for troubled boys, and the wrinkles carved in his face from worrying about money and her mother's health. Majoring in sociology, she says, "has made me hyper-aware of class differences here".
Weary of trying to pass as middle class, Barros decided to "come out", borrowing the phrase from the gay community. She joined and now leads the two-year-old Harvard College First Generation Student Union, which has 300 on its email list. "This is a movement," she said. "We are not ashamed of taking on this identity."
On the nation's most prestigious campuses, first-generation-in-college students like Barros are organising, speaking up about who they are and what's needed to make their path to a degree less fraught. There's the Hidden Minority Council at Princeton and the First-Generation Low-Income Partnership at Yale and Columbia. Lynda Lopez started the Socioeconomic Diversity Alliance after a Facebook page she created, UChicago Class Confessions, filled with frank exchanges within minutes.
And in February, 1vyG, a student group formed last spring at Brown, hosted the first Inter-Ivy First Generation Student Network Conference. Some 250 students came to the snowbound Rhode Island campus from as far away as Stanford and Pomona College. The conference had the feel of a giddy meet-up for people unaccustomed to seeing others like them.
They crashed on dorm room floors and wore cherry red conference T-shirts. Speakers included the president of Brown, a founder of the nonprofit QuestBridge, and the executive director of Michelle Obama's Reach Higher college campaign. Teach for America, the investment firm Bridgewater Associates and Google were sponsors.
Over three days, the conference unfolded as part edification (students left a talk on socioeconomics cheering "It's not our fault!"), part sharing and part empowerment. Participants traced obstacles, from juggling multiple jobs to frustrations when parents disapproved of majors they didn't understand.
Rudy Torres, a Brown junior from East Los Angeles, told of arriving at a welcome reception for admitted students at a Beverly Hills mansion only to have the host greet his father, a high school dropout, with a question: "Where did you go to undergrad?" The guests were white and the waiters, like his family, Mexican. "It was very uncomfortable," he said.
First-gen students cut across racial and ethnic lines. Not all are poor, but many are, including a majority of those at elite colleges. According to the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles, median family income is $37,565 for freshmen whose parents did not attend college and $99,635 for those whose parents did.
The economic gap is even starker at Ivy League universities. More than half of Harvard's freshman class come from families making more than $125,000 a year, including 15 per cent with incomes between $250,000 and $500,000 and another 14 per cent over $500,000. Many of the 15 per cent who are first-generation freshmen earn under $40,000, said William Fitzsimmons, dean of admissions and financial aid.
The first-gen label is slippery, though: Some federal programs, the Common Application and many Ivies, including Harvard and Brown, apply the term when parents don't have a bachelor's degree. Many others, including the National Centre for Education Statistics, often identify first-generation students as those whose parents have no college experience.
Of the 7.3 million full-time undergraduates attending four-year public and private nonprofit institutions, about 20 per cent are the first in their families to go to college. While the number has ticked up as college-going has increased overall, the proportion has actually declined from 40 years ago, when 38 per cent were first generation, according to the annual UCLA survey.
Thomas Mortenson, senior scholar at the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education, says that the rising cost of attendance, the shift in federal aid from grants to loans and tax credits, and the drive by public universities to attract more full-paying students has put full-time attendance out of reach. Many attend part time or enrol at two-year or for-profit colleges.
"They are concentrated in community colleges because that's what they can afford," Mortenson said.
The paucity of low-income students at selective colleges has long been problematic. Research by Stanford economist Caroline Hoxby shows that most high-achieving low-income students continue to "under-match". Without guidance from knowing parents and unaware that a well-endowed private college can be the most affordable option, qualified first-gen applicants often don't consider appropriately rigorous colleges.
The proportion of freshmen at elite campuses who are first generation - 11 per cent at Dartmouth, 12 per cent at Princeton, 14 per cent at Yale, 15 per cent at Amherst, 16 per cent at Cornell, 17 per cent at Brown - nearly matches that of their low-income Pell grant recipients. Washington University in St Louis, the least economically diverse top school, in January vowed to increase freshman enrolment of Pell recipients from 8 per cent to 13 per cent by 2020.
Despite efforts, the percentage doesn't budge much, and Fitzsimmons expects it will take a generation before hard-to-reach students consider Harvard in substantial numbers. "We have a long slog ahead of us."
What happens when students from undereducated families matriculate at the biggest brand names in higher education? It's complicated.
The very point of enrolling at elite schools, of course, is to absorb the power and privilege that come with the degree. That's harder for some than others, notes Anthony Abraham Jack, a doctoral candidate in sociology at Harvard who studies low-income students and their paths to college.
"Academically, all these students can do the work," he said. "The question becomes, 'When do social hurdles get in the way?'"
In his research, Jack describes two types of first-generation students: the "privileged poor" and the "doubly disadvantaged". The privileged poor attend private high schools or pre-college programs like Prep for Prep and A Better Chance, which ready them, he says, for the culture shock of a wealthy campus and give them practice interacting with adults. The doubly disadvantaged, he says, "stay in local, typically distressed and segregated high schools".
One of the hard things about being a low-income student, Jack said, is the breezy talk that unfolds when students describe "going to Martha's Vineyard or the Hamptons because that's where someone's graduation party was". Or when they recount vacations and travel. That makes spring break difficult, which is why he considers it a victory that, after being pressed, administrators kept two dining halls open last month, for the first time, in recognition that not all students can leave.
Administrators are still figuring out how to help.
Public four-year colleges and universities educate large numbers of first-generation students (1.7 million versus 623,000 at private nonprofits), though their graduation track records are mixed. Some, like the University of Kentucky and the University of Cincinnati, offer residence halls with special programming.
Elites are trying to catch up. Campuses have designated first-gen administrators, bolstered mentoring programs and added articles about socioeconomics to faculty readings on diversity. Some are careful in assigning roommates. "In a double, we would not put a student not on aid with a student on full aid," said Thomas Dingman, dean of freshmen at Harvard.
In January, Harvard named its first first-generation tutor. Jason Munster, who will be a sounding board on academic and social matters for first-gen students, grew up in a part of Maine so rural it was called simply "unorganised territory #6". He graduated from Harvard in 2007 and, after a stint in finance, is now a graduate student in engineering.
"Most people didn't know I was first gen until recently," he said. "If you see someone who is at Harvard who is white, you assume their parents went to college, especially someone blond-haired, blue-eyed and plays a sport like rugby."
Richard Light, a Harvard professor and higher education policy expert, and his colleagues at Georgetown, Duke and Brown are working to find out how first-generation students fare compared with others. Over the past two years they have interviewed more than 200 students from the classes of 2015 and 2016. The last group won't be interviewed until fall, but some findings are emerging.
Like Munster, many first-generation freshmen hadn't anticipated feeling less prepared than classmates. (In contrast, students from educated families who were underprepared knew it, and report feeling mentally and socially ready to face that.) They also tell of difficulty explaining their college experience to parents.
Foy, who is reviewing the Georgetown interviews, noted the added pressure felt by seniors facing the job search and the need to turn prestigious degrees into a payday. While college is about independence for affluent students, poor families view it as a lifeline to better circumstances.
"Students feel implicitly or explicitly an obligation to help out their families financially," she said. Students also say that, while they feel supported by the university, "they don't feel part of the greater Georgetown culture".
Colleges may not realise it, but signals they send can project upper-middle-class values. The $15 for a class outing can require 1½ hours of work; free tickets to student events are supposed to be handled discreetly but get announced at the door.
Rakesh Khurana, the Harvard College dean, said his icebreaker for students - share what your parents do for work - made a first-generation student uncomfortable last year; he now asks instead for a funny story about their middle name.
Nicole Stephens, a professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, said such cultural signals enable affluent students to see college as "a continuation of their experience". A first-generation student may wonder "if someone like me can do well here".
Students who don't think they fit in are less likely to reach out for help and more likely to suffer emotionally and have lower grades, said Stephens.
Manuel Contreras puts the turning point in his college life at 2am, when he met a fellow first gen at the SciLi, Brown's concrete-and-glass block of a science library, two weeks into a downward emotional spiral in the second semester of freshman year.
The son of Mexican immigrants - his father, with a third-grade education, is a supervisor at a landscaping company, and his mother is a hospital cleaner who takes pride "in being part of the healthcare system" - Contreras had suddenly, painfully, felt very alone.
He had just returned from winter break in San Diego. In his Aunt Antonieta's kitchen, sipping Nescafe from mismatched mugs, his uncles were wistfully talking about not being able to visit family in Mexico because they are undocumented when, he recalled, "I stepped beyond and gave a whole overview of immigration history". Their "dumbfounded stares" made him feel arrogant.
Did he not fit in at home anymore?
At the library that night, the student he met was also Mexican-American. They talked for more than an hour, wondering if they were worthy of a Brown education and sharing the stress of straddling two worlds. Contreras' was a one-story stucco house that his father had added onto himself until there were three bedrooms; his parents relied on him to help pay bills and to translate documents into Spanish.
The encounter in the library was a revelation.
It had never occurred to Contreras to share with a counsellor that he was "feeling sad or out of place".
Many first-generation students, with their histories of self-sufficiency and staring down obstacles, see seeking help as a sign of failure. One boon of Brown is all the tutoring, advising and writing help that one might want. While most students "feel entitled" to academic and emotional support, first-generation students, said Stanley Stewart, a Brown junior, "feel really guilty about taking advantage of resources".
Contreras fell into more conversations, losing hours in the dorm lounge with Stewart and Jessica Brown, fellow first-generation students. They planned an independent study project on the socioeconomic factors that affect first-gen transitions to college, and it was turned into a seminar taught by Gregory Elliot, a sociology professor.
In January 2014, they founded 1vyG to connect others like themselves across the Ivy League. The Swearer Centre for Public Service at Brown awarded them each $3,500 last summer to plan the conference. In March, Education Secretary Arne Duncan called to offer help with "your movement".
First-generation students live in a parallel universe on campus. They cannot text parents for help with paper topics or insights on choosing a major. They rarely see them. "Every time there is a parents' weekend it's painful," Contreras said. "It's another reminder mine can't afford to be here with me on this journey."
But more than any single challenge, first-generation students describe the pressure of something less firm to the grasp: the constant and steady weight of assumptions.
"We are at some of the wealthiest institutions in the world," said Stewart, whose family relies on public assistance. "No one expects us - people like us - to be here."
New York Times
