< Fitting In On Campus: Challenges For First-Generation Students

RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:

Students who are the first in their family to go to college and come from low-income families are four times more likely than other students to drop out in the first year. Many go to community colleges, but those who go to big, selective four-year institutions, in particular, face some big challenges when they get to campus. Michigan Radio's Jennifer Guerra reports.

JENNIFER GUERRA, BYLINE: Chris Reynolds will never forget his first day at the University of Michigan. He and his dad got up super early and drove nine and half hours from Sellersville, a blue-collar factory town in Pennsylvania, to Ann Arbor.

CHRIS REYNOLDS: My father literally just dropped me off and then left.

GUERRA: His dad couldn't afford a hotel, so they took about an hour to unpack the car, say their goodbyes and his dad drove off. Chris Reynolds was officially on his own. He thought he was pretty prepared. He had a dorm room, a meal plan, a couple hundred bucks to last until he found a job. What he wasn't prepared for was how lonely and out of place he felt on campus.

REYNOLDS: For example, I would ask - you know, someone would ask me, like, where did my parents go to college? And I said, well, my parents didn't go to college. They go OK, so what do your parents do? I was like, well, my mom is a housekeeper and my dad's unemployed. And then they're like, oh, OK.

GUERRA: It was hard for other students to understand that for us to go to college, we were taking a big risk.

ANNA GARCIA: This is Chris Reynolds's friend, Anna Garcia. She's a senior at U of M and, like Reynolds, she's the first in her family to go to college. Garcia grew up in Lincoln Park, a blue-collar city about 40 miles from U of M's campus. Culture-wise though, it might as well be 400 miles away.

GARCIA: People in my hometown thought that I was really stuck up all of a sudden because I decided to go to Michigan, and they know that Michigan is a very prestigious college.

GUERRA: Garcia and Reynolds met at a first-generation student support group on campus, which was nothing short of a lifeline in many ways. They found friends, people they could relate to. But Garcia says she could've used more help.

GARCIA: I know of many students who have left after their freshman year because they just felt like they couldn't find their place on campus.

GUERRA: Was there ever a point where you thought you were going to leave?

GARCIA: Absolutely, absolutely. My whole first semester I thought of transferring.

GUERRA: She stuck it out though and she's set to graduate as a pre-med English major this spring. Still, she hated how she had to constantly out herself as a low-income, first-generation student.

JENNIFER ENGLE: I think that is a very apt metaphor for thinking about how these students experience being in this very class-exclusive environment.

GUERRA: It's been 20 years since researcher Jennifer Engle was in college, and she's only recently started to admit to her colleagues that she was the first in her family to graduate. Engle has spent her career researching what life is like for low-income, first-generation college students, and she agrees with Garcia that, overall, schools don't do enough. She says here's how schools can step up their game - more financial aid, more supports like mentors - and this part is key - they need to be more proactive, so students don't have to out themselves when they need help.

ENGLE: So the outreach to low-income, first-generation students needs to be really intrusive on the part of the institution.

GUERRA: For his part, University of Michigan junior Chris Reynolds agrees. He says U of M is great at helping students like him pay for college. He's set to graduate next year with a degree in aerospace engineering and - fingers crossed - no debt. But he says it takes more than money to make students like him feel welcome.

REYNOLDS: Just to have someone in the university come up and tell us, like, you belong here and we're so excited to have you here. That would have changed everything for me.

GUERRA: For NPR News, I'm Jennifer Guerra in Ann Arbor.

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