Princeton Strives to Help First-Generation Students Feel More at Home

Victoria Davidjohn didn’t realize that she was elite-college material until she attended a summer program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before her senior year of high school, setting off a whirlwind application process.

So getting into Princeton University was “validating” and “joyful,” Ms. Davidjohn said, but at the same time, “there’s a huge amount of fear.”

Ms. Davidjohn grew up in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and learned English after moving to Lynchburg, Va., in 2008. She is no stranger to culture shock.

Despite her excitement about Princeton, she felt unprepared. So when she received an invitation to attend the Freshman Scholars Institute, which brings selected first-generation and low-income students to the campus for an academic and social introduction to Princeton, Ms. Davidjohn did not hesitate to say yes.

During the institute last summer, Ms. Davidjohn bonded with other incoming students who were just as nervous about starting at Princeton as she was.

She also found her way around the campus before most of her new classmates arrived, putting her in a position to give a fellow freshman directions during orientation. “I felt like I belonged,” she said.

Now a rising sophomore, she plans to help out with this year’s institute, which starts on Saturday and runs through September 2.

While helping first-generation and low-income students succeed is a rallying cry across higher education, the challenge plays out differently at elite colleges, where they tend to make up a smaller share of the student body and where sizable numbers of their classmates come from tremendous privilege. And it may be especially acute at Princeton. After all, two prominent alumnae — the first lady, Michelle Obama, and the Supreme Court justice Sonia M. Sotomayor — have been quite candid about the challenges they encountered there.

The rarefied environment of a place like Princeton can undermine first-generation and low-income students’ sense that they belong there. And research shows that that sense of belonging really matters, influencing students’ academic as well as social experience of college. So elite colleges must make a real effort to help students from less-advantaged backgrounds feel at home.

At Princeton, two relatively new administrators are spearheading that effort: Khristina Gonzalez, associate dean of the college and director of programs for access and inclusion, and Nimisha Barton, associate director of the Freshman Scholars Institute and programs for access and inclusion.

Their goal is twofold: Empower first-generation students to make Princeton work for them, and make the university more welcoming to students from diverse backgrounds. To do that, the two administrators are drawing on their own experiences, their scholarship in liberal-arts disciplines, and feedback from the summer program’s alumni.

“We’re up against a lot in terms of history,” Ms. Barton said. And universities don’t change overnight.

‘People Don’t Understand’

Doug Ashley found that his small Montana high school “had not prepared me very well” for the academic work at Princeton. It did not offer calculus, for one thing, so Mr. Ashley, a first-generation student who graduated this spring with a degree in computer science, took it online.

Mr. Ashley noticed that some classmates in his introductory physics classes had already taken the Advanced Placement version of the course and were expecting an easy A. That left him working hard to learn what some of them already knew. “The hard part,” he said, “was mainly there wasn’t a level playing field.”

That was true socially, too. Mr. Ashley planned to join one of the university’s 11 eating clubs, but it didn’t work out because of an administrative mix-up. Meals provide a key time for busy students to catch up with friends, Mr. Ashley said, and the expense of an eating club, plus the groups’ reputation as oriented toward wealthy students, causes separation, as low-income students are more likely to eat in the dining halls or cook for themselves.

Mr. Ashley and other students like him said that there was no stigma around being first-generation at Princeton. But they said other students at the university were sometimes oblivious to what life looked like for their peers from less-advantaged backgrounds.

“Mainly it comes down to minor things where people don’t understand,” he said, like watching classmates take fancy vacations during breaks while being unable to afford to even travel home.

Ms. Gonzalez, 34, knows what it is like to feel out of place in the Ivy League. She was the first in her family to attend an elite institution — both of her parents had earned associate degrees when she enrolled at Dartmouth College, though her mother went on for more education around the time she was there. She recalls showing up to go on a pre-college hiking trip dressed up in her heels and confronting a sea of students in Patagonia — she hadn’t realized that everyone would arrive in their hiking gear.

Ms. Gonzalez, who earned a Ph.D. in English from Brown University in 2012, also sees connections between her scholarship and her administrative work. She examines the relationship between the Victorian novel, English assimilative social-reform movements, and the backlash to those movements. Studying what happened when social institutions were becoming less exclusive in 19th-century England informs how she thinks about Princeton’s efforts to do the same today.

Ms. Barton, 31, also brings both personal and scholarly experience to her role. The daughter of an American father and a mother who immigrated from India, she spent her undergraduate years at the University of California at Berkeley, a diverse campus where all of her closest friends had immigrant experiences of their own. After college, as her friends started their jobs, Ms. Barton went to Princeton for graduate school and was “just lost.”

Only when she got involved in the Freshman Scholars Institute, first as a resident graduate student, did she find a vocabulary to explain her own experience as a first-generation student. She stayed involved with the program, spending one summer as a writing-center fellow and then teaching the program’s humanities course the summer after defending her dissertation. She began her current position just over a year ago.

Ms. Barton, who earned a Ph.D. in history in 2014, has given some thought to what sorts of students Berkeley and Princeton were originally built to educate, and how that can shape the student experience at each, even today.

Her scholarly interest is immigration, with a focus on the norms set by states and societies that make some people insiders and others outsiders. These days, cultivating a sense of belonging among students who may feel like outsiders is a big part of her job.

It’s an important one, too. “When students don’t have a sense of fit or belonging, that affects their level of engagement with the college environment,” said Nicole Stephens, an associate professor of management and organizations at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. If they feel disconnected from the campus, Ms. Stephens said, students may be less likely to reach out to a professor when they need help or to make new friends. That, she said, can create a negative, self-reinforcing cycle.

Before beginning her graduate program at Princeton, Ms. Barton had decided to become a professor. But she hadn’t understood that getting a Ph.D. was about research, not learning how to be a teacher. Graduate school was disorienting. “I didn’t know what was wrong with me,” she said. These days, when she hears students say, “I was smart before I came to Princeton. What happened?,” she wants them to know that the problem is not them; it’s Princeton. Ms. Barton learned that only in her late 20s, she said, and hopes her students don’t have to wait as long.

A Sense of Belonging

Princeton has been working to recruit less-advantaged students for some time. The university eliminated loans from the financial-aid packages of low-income students back in 1998 (it expanded the policy to cover all students in 2001). Like its peers, Princeton has a number of programs meant to increase socioeconomic diversity on its campus.

But bringing students to the campus and supporting them after they arrive are two different things. That’s where programs like the Freshman Scholars Institute come in.

Princeton has been running some form of summer bridge program for so long that the administrators in charge of it now aren’t quite sure when or why it began. From what Ms. Barton has pieced together, it seems to have its origins in programming for athletes and minority students. Even five years ago, she said, “the mission was very unclear.”

Ms. Barton and Ms. Gonzalez are working to focus and achieve that mission, both by fine-tuning the institute and by expanding on its work.

Students are invited to the institute based on a holistic evaluation meant to uncover which incoming freshmen have had the least exposure to an environment like Princeton’s. Selected students are a subset of the university’s incoming first-generation and low-income freshmen — distinct but overlapping groups. Those who accept the invitation take two credit-bearing classes and are introduced to many of the university’s support resources and extracurricular opportunities.

One way that colleges can help students feel the all-important sense of belonging, said Ms. Stephens, the Northwestern professor, is to make sure they know that “being a good student does not mean being independent.” Successful students at elite colleges seek help when they need it.

That’s part of what the two administrators want to emphasize to first-generation students. All students need help navigating the bureaucracy and customs of a place like Princeton; it’s just that some walk in the door with a support system poised to guide them through it, and others do not. By building such a system for first-generation and low-income students, “we’re rendering visible to everyone what your average student needs,” Ms. Barton said.

High-school students absorb knowledge, while college students are supposed to create it. That shift can be tricky for anyone, but less-advantaged students may not believe that they have the right to make their scholarly mark — the very thing college will ask them to do, Ms. Gonzalez said. Part of what the Freshman Scholars Institute strives to teach the students, she said, is “how to have your voice heard as a scholar.” The idea is not to assimilate first-generation students or turn them into “some kind of mythic Princeton student,” she said, but to help them unleash the unique contributions they can make to the university.

After all, one major reason colleges seek a diverse student body is so that all students benefit from hearing from a wide range of experiences and views.

Sharing Knowledge

The transition into college is widely seen as a pivotal moment for students — there’s a reason every message administrators want to convey to them is crammed into orientation. But when Ms. Barton and Ms. Gonzalez met with alumni of the Freshman Scholars Institute as part of their effort to improve it, one of the most consistent messages they heard was that the summer program wasn’t enough. It didn’t reach all the students who might benefit, and even those who attended wanted support during college, not just on their way in the door.

Based on that feedback, the two administrators developed the new Scholars Institute Fellows Program, which covers all four years at Princeton. It’s available to students who completed the Freshman Scholars Institute, those who were invited but couldn’t go, those who were considered but not invited, and anyone who self-identifies as first-generation or low-income. One hundred students participated last fall, and the number rose to 155 last spring.

SIFP, as it is known, is based in peer mentorship. Upperclassmen serve as “head fellows,” who mentor 10 or so underclassmen with the help of a faculty member.

The program is voluntary, but students who participate are expected to go to events put on by SIFP, like sessions on networking or résumés, or cross-listed events held by the career center or writing center. Students are also expected to attend monthly meetings with their mentorship groups and do a summer enrichment experience, like an internship or study abroad.

Nora Niazian participated in the Freshman Scholars Institute, but even so, she said, “there were a lot of things about transitioning to Princeton that were difficult for me.”

This past year, Ms. Niazian served as a head fellow in the Scholars Institute Fellows Program, and she plans to do so again next year as a senior. “If I can make it easier for anyone else, that would be a great thing to do,” she said.

As a head fellow, Ms. Niazian brings her hard-won knowledge of how Princeton works to younger students who may not be able to get the answers they need from parents or others in their communities back home. For instance, Ms. Niazian said, it took her two years to understand how the financial-aid office’s “summer savings expectation” works, but now she can explain it as well as anyone can. “I’ve had to navigate a lot of these things already,” she said.

The program has also become a big part of Ms. Niazian’s social life at Princeton. She didn’t join an eating club for financial reasons, and SIFP “helps to kind of fill that void,” she said. “A lot of what is happening at Princeton now,” she said, “is we’re starting to establish a low-income, first-generation community.”

Beckie Supiano writes about college affordability, the job market for new graduates, and professional schools, among other things. Follow her on Twitter @becksup, or drop her a line at beckie.supiano@chronicle.com.