Let’s imagine that you’re reading an application from a prospective college student whose mother never enrolled at a postsecondary institution and whose father earned a bachelor’s degree. Would you consider them a first-generation student?
But wait, let’s say their father earned his degree in another country. What then? OK, now let’s imagine that the father earned a four-year degree at a domestic college, but the applicant doesn’t live with him and has no contact with him. Might you consider them “first gen”?
Researchers at the Common Application explore such questions in a new brief on “first-generation” status, a long-familiar term that lacks a universal meaning; colleges use varying definitions, which often vexes applicants and college counselors. “This confuses a lot of people, and they’re right to be confused,” says Brian Heseung Kim, director of data science, research, and analytics at the Common Application and the lead author of the brief.
The research is timely. Since the U.S. Supreme Court barred the consideration of applicants’ racial status this past summer, colleges have talked a big game about doubling down on various markers of student disadvantage, including Pell Grant eligibility and whether they are first generation. Researchers have long known that parents’ level of education plays a large role in determining who enrolls in college — and who ends up earning a degree.
The problem is that one college’s definition of a first-generation student might not look like another’s. The Common Application, along with many institutions, uses the definition in the 1998 Higher Education Act Amendments, which define first generation as a student whose parents — or parent, in the case of those residing with and receiving support from just one — didn’t earn a bachelor’s degree.
But some colleges define it as a student whose parents never attended college. Some institutions consider a student whose parents earned degrees in other countries as “first gen”; others don’t. Brown University defines it “as any student who may self-identify as not having prior exposure to or knowledge of navigating higher institutions such as Brown and may need additional resources.”
Got all that, kiddo?
The Common App’s researchers don’t argue in favor of a particular definition. Instead, they examine how seemingly small changes in the ways colleges determine who is “first generation” can affect large numbers of students. In the 2022-23 admissions cycle, for instance, setting a threshold of “any attendance at a higher-education institution” by an applicant’s parents would’ve resulted in about 127,000 fewer students — or nearly 11 percent of all domestic applicants — being considered first generation, as compared with a bachelor’s-degree threshold.
Kim and his colleagues also were interested in when students’ parents earned degrees. Six percent of domestic applicants in 2022-23 had parents who obtained a bachelor’s degree after the student was born. “This is noteworthy,” the brief says, “because students in these circumstances may not experience the same longer-term benefits of financial stability and educational support from their parents as students whose parents obtained their degrees” earlier on in their family’s history.
One especially important finding reminds us that many students don’t grow up in two-parent homes. Just over 30 percent of all domestic applicants reported living with just one biological parent and/or with other caregivers, including stepparents, grandparents, and legal guardians. “Whether we consider the additional caregiver’s degree attainment, or exclude the absent parent’s degree attainment,” the researchers write, “thus has potentially large implications for first-generation calculations.”
Another revealing finding: Nearly 12 percent of domestic applicants in 2022-23 reported having limited information about one or both of their parents. It’s important to consider, the researchers write, “whether closeness and exposure between students and parents plays a role in the benefits implied by having a parent with a college degree.”
Many enrollment leaders are thinking harder than ever about the best ways to measure the adversity and gauge the disadvantages that many applicants have experienced. The Common App’s new findings — the first of three planned analyses of the complexities behind first-gen status — underscore that it’s a crucial but complicated variable. Colleges are advised to consider it carefully and, perhaps, in more nuanced ways than before.
“Whenever we talk about a demographic like first generation, we are making assumptions about those students, we are implying things about those students,” Kim says. “And I think it’s important to make sure those assumptions don’t go unchallenged.”
And it’s worth keeping in mind that most definitions of first-gen status are determined by colleges, policymakers, and other powerful entities. “This brief is looking how other people define a student as first generation or not,” Kim says. “And that’s really a separate question from how would first-generation students identify themselves, and why? And what does it mean to them?”
