First-Generation Students at Selective Colleges

Chapter 2 provides a portrait of first-generation students who attend selective colleges by placing them in comparison with continuing-generation students, the dominant demographic group on these campuses. This chapter focuses on students’ high school backgrounds—the ways they get to college—and then discusses briefly the ways this background leads them into an initial institutional sorting process. While first-generation students share a similarly strong high school academic profile as their continuing-generation counterparts, they come of age within very different contexts. The authors show that some of these differences have implications for how first-generation students identify connections on campus during the first few weeks of college. Moreover, first-generation students find themselves in somewhat different campus geographies than continuing-generation at the end of their first year of college. First-generation are more likely to be Disconnected than their continuing-generation peers and less embedded in campus geographies connected to mainstream social life (Play Hard and Multisphere).