New Roles Focus on First-Generation Students’ Issues

One-third of college students are the first in their family to attend, and four-year colleges are starting to devote more resources to this group, creating administrative positions to support them.

Last April at Florida Atlantic University, Ron Oliver became director of a newly created Office of First-Generation Student Success. About a quarter of the university’s students, or 7,151 students, are first-generation, he says.

“We want them to interact with their peers,” he says, “and have a place where they have a voice.”

Among the first things his office did was to create a student organization, First and Proud, to foster a sense of belonging. Tapping skills he developed as an assistant basketball coach at Florida Atlantic and as a career coach, Oliver tries to understand first-generation students’ mind-sets and help them overcome obstacles. “If you’re thinking in a more positive way,” he says, “you tend to push through that challenge.”

His office oversees an emerging-scholars program whose goal is to have selected first-generation students graduate debt free, without missing out on opportunities like study abroad.

A second program provides students with books and academic support. A third program, the Urban Male Initiative, tries to motivate students to finish college in four years.

Long-term goals of the office are to improve retention and graduation rates among first-generation students, Oliver says. Over all, he says, 25 percent of first-generation students “drop out after year one, so that’s also a huge reason why you’re seeing the creation of offices and positions” like the ones at Florida Atlantic.

For help with best practices, Oliver turns to a center started last year by Naspa: Student Affairs Administrators in Higher Education, in partnership with the Suder Foundation.

Sarah E. Whitley, senior director of Naspa’s Center for First-Generation Student Success, can’t say exactly how many directors of first-generation student success colleges have hired, but “interest is growing rapidly.” The center provides people in those roles with training, conferences, research, and ways to connect.

One reason it is hard to tally up an exact number is the frequent intersection between students’ first-generation identity and other identities, like being from low-income families or rural communities, or being adult students, undocumented immigrants, members of racial or ethnic minority groups, or LGBT, Whitley says. Job titles often refer to oversight for at least one of those other groups.

The greater focus on first-generation students includes highly selective colleges. At the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where about 3,400 undergraduates are first-generation, Adan Hussain oversees the First-Generation Student Gateway, a space where students can meet and get help navigating assistance from four offices. It is “the place that they can ask the question they’re nervous about asking outside because it seems like their peers all seem to understand what rushing is, or what Greek life is, or what credit hour means,” he says.

Hussain’s position as first-generation project manager evolved from an organization for first-generation students that was started 11 years ago by Dwight Lang, a sociology lecturer. The group eventually outgrew meetings at Lang’s home. Hussain began his role a year and a half ago.

“We focus on first-gens getting connected to staff and faculty, to build their network on campus, and we also want first-gens to meet one another, since it’s an invisible identity,” he says.

In forming the center, Hussain looked to Brown and Stanford Universities as models. At Stanford, the Diversity and First-Gen Office, created seven years ago, has grown to the point where it will soon be split in two. Dereca Blackmon, assistant vice provost and executive director of the office, will lead the diversity and inclusivity side. Her colleague, Jennifer Rolen, assistant dean and associate director, will lead the first-generation and low-income side.

Having a dedicated office that supports these students from acceptance to graduation has “a huge impact on infrastructure at the university and raising the consciousness about these issues campuswide,” Blackmon says.

Services include a mentoring program that pairs up first-generation graduate students with undergraduates, a textbook-exchange program, and an Opportunity Fund to help students meet unexpected costs. The push for the services has come from interested donors and the university’s first-generation and low-income students. Rolen sums up the office’s message for those students: “You’re not alone, you belong here, and you’ll be successful.”

Many administrators who work with first-generation students, like Blackmon, Rolen, and Hussain, were themselves the first in their families to attend college.

Whitley, of Naspa, says that directors of such services are often relatively new to their institutions. In such cases, she says, they may need the support of “a more seasoned person at the institution who has the ear of senior leadership.” Whether new to the university or familiar with the campus culture, Whitley says, those administrators need to be “a jack of all trades.”

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