Look to Leadership: LSA commits support for first-gen students

“Access without support is not an opportunity.”

This quote from Syracuse University sociologist Vincent Tinto has long served as a clarion call for colleges and universities across the country. A call to go further than recruiting students from all backgrounds, and to develop systems that offer academic, financial, and social support throughout their college journeys.

We must remember that, while some students arrive on our campus after years of attending football games at the Big House, having dinners at Pizza House, and spinning The Cube, others join us as the first in their families who will graduate from a four-year college. They do not have parents or siblings who can help clarify the unspoken rules about professors’ “office hours” or places to seek (free) help from peer tutors, like the Science Learning Center.

At the University of Michigan and the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts, we have achieved great success in supporting first-gen students, but we should not rest on our laurels. Amid widespread economic uncertainty and growing criticism directed toward institutions of higher education, we must intensify our efforts to ensure the success of our first-gen students throughout the duration of their college careers.

The university’s commitment to making a Life-Changing Education accessible to all is illustrated by the Go Blue Guarantee, an important testament to our values and to providing a rigorous education to the next generation of civic leaders. At U-M, we have made tremendous strides building out university-wide financial support for the 5,000 first-gen undergraduates across our three campuses. Our collective work as a university community has resulted in a graduation rate of more than 90% for first-gen students — more than triple the national average.

Of the 5,000 first-gen students at U-M, more than 3,000 are enrolled in LSA. Thus, within LSA, we have developed a suite of programs that extend far beyond financial scholarships to support first-gen students.

As one example, the Kessler Scholars Program is widely heralded as the national gold standard for first-gen support, providing four years of intensive, wraparound support for student cohorts through one-on-one advising, peer mentoring, seminars, and targeted programming that create a strong and supportive sense of community and belonging.

We are indebted to the enormous generosity of LSA alums like Judy and Fred Wilpon, whose financial support launched the Kessler Scholars Program in 2008. Today, this program has become a national model, with the Kessler Scholars Collaborative expanding its work to more than a dozen institutions across the country.

Since the 1980s, the U-M Comprehensive Studies Program has provided early access, summer bridge, and first-year academic and community support for first-gen students, low-income students, and students of color. More recently, LSA has launched the First-Generation Commitment to engage and serve first-gen and limited-income students throughout their time on campus. This program leverages research-based best practices to promote a sense of collective pride and belonging among first-gen students.

Further, many LSA departments have developed their own programs to support first-gen students, such as the SOUL program in the Department of Sociology and Maze-in-Blue in the Departments of Astronomy, Physics, and Earth and Environmental Sciences.

Despite all this, there is still much more work to be done.

National trends continue to point to persistent disparities between first-gen and continuing-gen students on GPA, graduation rates, sense of college belonging, and use of campus resources. Within LSA, many first-gen students still describe a college environment that does not make them feel welcomed or included.

In workshops led by the U-M Center for Research on Learning and Teaching, students described “an ache of not belonging,” a constant sense of not fitting in, of being alone, and of searching for a place to feel comfortable. The sense of being an outsider can pervade every context of students’ experiences in college — classrooms, dorms, social activities, and time away from school over holidays and summer months.

As a first-gen student myself, I understand these feelings and remember my own experience getting through college on a lot of financial aid, work study jobs, and imposter syndrome. Today, I share honestly with students and tell them that I still sometimes feel the sense of not belonging to the prestigious university and college where I work.

When rushing to a meeting in an administrative building earlier this year, for example, one of the attendants followed me across the lobby to the elevator, as she continually questioned me about whether I had a meeting in the building and actually knew where I was going. Security guards have stopped me from entering commencement events (where I am scheduled to sit on the stage) on more than one occasion.

Our first-gen students need to know they are not alone.

This is why I am deeply committed to further building and scaling our support for all first-gen students. It is our responsibility to ensure that every student has access to the resources they need to succeed academically.

The missing piece of the puzzle is often connection — meaningful connections to people and between offices, between programs, between funding streams, and, most importantly, connection to the necessary support systems that sustain student success.

In LSA, a core group of college leaders, faculty, and staff are developing ways to coordinate and scale our support for first-gen students. In addition to building on the strengths of LSA’s current first-gen student programs, we plan to invite LSA faculty and staff to serve as mentors to our first-gen students in a new cohort-based support program.

The College of LSA will continue to prioritize support for students from all backgrounds. We have a responsibility to enhance and scale our support for first-gen students with evidence-based and research-informed practices, rooted in a strengths-based approach.

As we move forward, this work will be a top priority for LSA.

— By Rosario (Rosie) Ceballo, dean of the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts (LSA), and a professor in the Department of Psychology and the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies. Ceballo is a nationally recognized, interdisciplinary scholar whose research examines the strengths and resilience of families living in poverty, with a focus on adolescents who experience community violence.

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