Arredondo, M. FIRST-GENERATION COLLEGE STUDENTS AT A SELECTIVE, FOUR-YEAR INSTITUTION: TRANSITION TO COLLEGE, ADJUSTMENT IN COLLEGE, AND SELF-IMAGE. UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, LOS ANGELES, PHD, 1999

Little is known about how first-generation students are affected by the college experience. This study was undertaken with the intention of broadening our knowledge and understanding of first-generation college students by (1) providing a national portrait of who they are and how they compare to children of college graduates; and (2) exploring the factors which facilitate or impede first-generation students’ transition to college, academic and social adjustment, and academic and social self-image in a selective research university.

Data from three analyses were used in this study. First, descriptive analyses were conducted on a national sample of first-generation freshmen (n = 36,767) and freshmen children of college graduates (n = 167,483) from the 1997 Freshmen Survey collected by the Cooperative Institutional Research Institute (CIRP). Second, multivariate analyses were conducted on a sample of first-generation students (n = 233) and children of college graduates (n = 324) who had been previously surveyed as entering freshmen (in 1994 or 1995) and resurveyed in the Winter of 1999—four or five years after they first entered college. Finally, qualitative analyses were conducted on first-generation students’ responses to open-ended questions obtained from the follow-up survey.

Findings confirm that, nationally, first-generation students do in fact differ extensively from children of college graduates on various precollege characteristics. Multivariate results reveal that while first-generation status was correlated in the expected direction (i.e., negatively) with all six dependent measures—transition to college, undergraduate GPA, social adjustment, academic adjustment, social self-image, and academic self-image—for three of these variables this relationship was eliminated by controlling for certain input characteristics. Open-ended findings show that first-generation students encounter obstacles which interfere with their involvement (Astin, 1984) and integration (Tinto, 1987, 1993) and thus prevent them from taking full advantage of the college experience. While the open-ended results suggest that participating in special support programs contributes positively to first-generation students’ adjustment to college, these positive effects were not replicated in the multivariate analyses.

In short, this study shows that the difficulties that first-generation students experience in college cannot be explained entirely in terms of traditional factors such as academic preparation and income.