LET'S START BY BUILDING CULTURAL CAPITAL.

Baa Ram sociologist Steven P. Dandaneau makes a suggestion.  "Stop Labeling Students ‘First-Gen’."

To put it bluntly, what business is it of ours, or anyone’s, what a student’s parents’ educational attainment happens to be? The usual answer is that we inquire because we aim to foster upward social mobility, and because we know from research that students who are the first in their families to attend college do not succeed at the same cohort rates as so-called continuing-generation students. But I emphasize cohort rates because we are not talking about a group, defined by self-awareness and interaction, but indeed a cohort, defined by impersonal and ill-defined criteria. At the level of individuals and families, first-gen discourse presumes deficits, is intrusive and can be off-putting and condescending.

Neither of your parents (you have two, right?) earned a bachelor’s degree?

I’d venture that most who work with first-gen students would agree that there are enduring questions about how best to define who is and is not first-generation using one of several plausible definitions. And even after four decades of promotion, I think it’s fair to say that few students arrive on campus as self-conscious “first-gens,” however defined.

Well, yeah.

Is it too much to ask that the people who want to influence higher education stop treating the nontraditional students as somehow less capable?  "It is a libel to think of first-generation or non-traditional as synonymous with less capable of handling college work."

Yes, there are students who hit college with less intellectual capital, but how often might that be the consequence of bad decisions they made earlier, or bad work beginning in grammar school?  Let's pay careful attention to the following descent from the lofty to the mundane.

In that "you have two, right" you get an idea where that essay might be going.  What is it about educated cosmopolitans that they might be down for the struggle in principle and yet live their lives according to the success sequence?

The professor's continuation is straightforward enough.

Some imagine that they qualify if they are the first of their siblings to attend college. Others wonder, understandably, if a parent’s associate degree or years of college attendance not resulting in degree attainment substitutes for an earned bachelor’s degree. A few may even think, erroneously, that they qualify if they are the first in their family to attend a particular institution.

And then there are the overriding problems of stigma and stereotype threat.

So far, so good.  "Too much talent is being wasted under the patronising rubric of first-generation, non-traditional, disadvantaged, what have you is equivalent to being not up to developing a first-rate mind."  Or, when I'm feeling cynical about higher education's value proposition, "The faculty is complicit in the failure. Mr Brandon suggests that sub-prime party schools have fallen into what I call the Wayne State trap: the presence of non-traditional or first-generation or commuting students becomes an excuse to lower standards."

The professor, though, is writing for the house organ for all wokeness, all the time, and he decides "born that way" can apply to one's sexuality, but not to one's inheritance of collegiate traditions.

Instead of fighting a Sisyphean battle tainted by class bias, I suggest that we acknowledge that first-gen discourse defines students by a characteristic that is out of their control and that the label is troubling when applied to individual students. Consider that we have more control over almost every other way of identifying ourselves, including our gender and sexuality! Parents, guardians and other parental authorities are as close to a given as it gets, and to define one by a given is reductionist and objectifying.

It gets better from there.

What if we labeled students whose parents possess earned doctorates as “dockies” and awarded them membership in the honors program? Most would recoil at even the thought of it. We assume that dockies are privileged or at least not in need of privileged access to scarce resources. We imagine them as possessed of abundant social and cultural capital and a healthy amount of regular old capital, too. Why actively reproduce privilege?

But let us immediately observe that such assumptions are just as potentially ill-founded for individual dockies as they are for individual first-gens. Ask a Ph.D.-holding parent of a neurodiverse child, of a drug-addicted child, a child with disabilities, a child prone to perfectionism, a child of mild ambition and so forth, and they are apt to share an earful. And let us acknowledge that dockies are often given access to scarce resources such as merit-based scholarships and extra help via supportive honors programs, and for legitimate reasons. For one, these students earn such considerations by virtue of their academic achievement. They also may need them to fulfill their considerable potential.

The key distinction, then, is between how we relate to students as individuals and what we do to make our institutional practices and campus cultures accessible and just.

It's not that hard.  There are matriculants capable of college work.  There are matriculants not so capable.  "Gosh, if only the common schools would do more to inculcate the habits of the middle class, and the Student Affairs types would stop (condescendingly?) applying an implicit set of deficiencies that comes bundled with first-generation-non-traditional-diverse incoming students would understand that due on time means due on time, examinations take place as scheduled, and matriculants are capable of reading, writing, and figuring at the college level."

Professor Dandaneau might object.

Colleges and universities cannot meet their missions in a democratic society unless they are shorn of institutionalized discrimination rooted in white supremacy, patriarchy, what the poet Adrienne Rich called “compulsory heterosexuality,” ableism, ageism, as well as discrimination against veterans and active-duty armed service members, students whose home countries are not the United States or for whom English is not their first language, students from rural communities, students from urban communities, students from tribal communities, students from foster homes, students who are first-gen as well as students who identify with one or more of the above and then some. Our to-do list is long and varied.

First-gen discourse is, like most student success discourse, best suited for use by administrators. It is not usually the language of educators, nor should we foist it upon students themselves. To best aid students who are the first in their families to attend college, make higher education affordable, campuses welcoming, curricula efficient and effective.

I can think of no more effective way to ensure that U.S. News college guides sell well than to double down on access-assessment-remediation-retention seasoned with identity politics.  The administrators can continue to congratulate themselves on their inclusiveness, and the students don't learn.