Research Guides: First Generation Student Resources: Student Success

Student Success

College Readiness; First-Generation Students: College Access, Persistence, and Post-bachelor's Outcomes
This brief paper on the first-generation student data from the National Center for Education Statistics examines various characteristics of firstgeneration students, including personal, enrollment, academic, and career. The study’s aim is to answer how first-generation students fare compared to their non-first-generation student counterparts in college enrollment, college persistence, and college graduation.

First-Generation College Students by Lee Ward; Michael J. Siegel; Zebulun Davenport
ISBN: 9780470474440
Publication Date: 2012-07-10
The authors provide an overview of first-generation student characteristics as well as their experiences to and through college. Focusing a chapter on culture, class, race, and ethnicity, the book asks readers to consider how cultural capital affects first-generation student outcomes. The authors provide broad suggestions for improving the campus climate and institutional policies and processes so that first-generation students will feel more integrated and supported.

Academic Advising and First-Generation College Students: A Quantitative Study on Student Retention
This quantitative study sought to determine the effect on enrollment status and academic standing for first-generation students at a large, public research institution in the Southeast United States in which 30% of the incoming freshman class was first-generation. The researchers used a sample of 363 historical records for a multiple logistic regression to determine the relationship between the number of meetings with an academic advisor and retention of first-generation students, as represented by enrollment status and academic standing. The records included student academic fact sheets and tracking of student–advisor face-to-face interactions. While the researchers did not compare first-generation student results with non-first-generation student, findings from this study suggest that for every meeting with an academic advisor, the odds that a first-generation student will be retained increase by 13%.