The Rise of the First-Generation College Student: A Ubiquitous Category in Need of Critical Analysis

In US higher education, the category ‘first-generation college student’ has become ubiquitous. Students without parents who graduated from college are categorized as such, programs are designed for them, and researchers study them. Used as a proxy for socioeconomic status, this category offers a way for colleges and universities to acknowledge vast resource differences among students while evading direct discussion of social class itself. Research on first-generation college students often positions the category as the starting point of the analysis, measuring, for example, gaps in academic performance between first-generation and continuing-generation students. Here, I call for the first-generation college student category itself to be positioned as the object of critical analysis. I draw on the critical tradition in the sociology of education to reveal the category’s ideological dimensions. Specifically, I argue that the first-generation college student category reflects and supports two pillars of neoliberalism in higher education: meritocracy and diversity.