The Question I Get Asked Most About First-Generation Students

The Question

Almost every time I talk with an educator, a mentor, or a parent about first-generation students, I get some version of the same question: what's the one thing that would help these students most?

People usually expect me to say money. Scholarships, grants, tuition assistance. And money matters, I'm not going to pretend it doesn't. But after years of research and conversations with students, I don't think it's the real answer. The real answer is information, and specifically, the kind of information that families with college experience pass down without even noticing they're doing it.

Why Money Isn't the Whole Story

Here's what I mean. A student whose parents went to college usually absorbs dozens of small facts along the way. When to start looking at schools. How financial aid actually works, not just that it exists. What office hours are for. That you're allowed to email a professor and ask for help. That switching majors isn't a crisis. None of this gets taught in a classroom. It gets absorbed at the dinner table, in casual conversation, almost by accident.

A first-generation student doesn't have that dinner table conversation. They might have parents who care just as much about their success, sometimes more, but who simply never went through the process themselves. So the student is left to reconstruct, often under pressure and often too late, information that other students got for free.

I've seen a fully funded student drop out not because of cost, but because they didn't know how to ask for an extension, didn't know academic probation wasn't permanent, and assumed the polite thing to do was disappear quietly rather than ask for help. That's not a money problem. That's an information problem.

What Actually Helps

So when people ask me what to do, I usually point them toward three things, in roughly this order.

First, name the invisible curriculum. Sit down with a student and go through the unwritten rules explicitly. How to read a syllabus for what actually matters. How to interpret a professor's tone in an email. What a degree audit is and why it should be checked every semester, not once a year. None of this requires funding. It requires someone willing to spend an hour explaining things that feel obvious to them and are not obvious at all to the student.

Second, connect students to someone who has already gone through it, ideally someone close to their own background. Mentorship works because it compresses years of trial and error into a single conversation. A first-generation graduate a few years ahead can answer questions a student would never think to ask an advisor, because the advisor's job title makes the question feel too small or too personal.

Third, treat libraries and community programs as part of the support system, not an afterthought. A lot of students figure things out not through the university itself but through a public library program, a community center, or a local nonprofit that fills in gaps the institution never addresses. I grew up seeing how much a library card and a patient librarian could do for a kid who didn't have another way in. That stuck with me.

Where This Shows up in Practice

I've watched the difference this makes in small, specific moments. A student who knows they can walk into office hours without an appointment behaves differently than one who assumes it's off-limits. A student who has been told, explicitly, that failing a class once doesn't end their academic career makes different choices under stress than one who thinks it does.

None of these interventions are expensive. They're not glamorous either. Nobody writes a headline about explaining what a syllabus means. But when I compare the students who had someone walk them through the unwritten rules against the ones who didn't, the difference in confidence and persistence is obvious.

The Short Version

If I had to compress the answer into one sentence, it's this: the biggest gap for first-generation students usually isn't what they lack financially, it's what they don't know to ask. Money can be raised. Scholarships can be applied for. But nobody applies for information they don't know exists.

The next time someone asks me the same question, that's still what I'll tell them. Start with what the student doesn't know they don't know. Everything else gets easier from there.