The Problem with First Gen
The term “First Gen” was coined in the 1980s when the government sought to increase the number of citizens with an advanced education. Early studies such as London’s (1989) “Breaking Away: A Study of First-Generation College Students and Their Families” highlighted the tensions created when young adults “broke away” from their family’s history to pursue a new trajectory. The research was intended to bring awareness and support to the unique needs of such students. In attending to this goal, however, educational research often compares the histories and academic trajectories of first generation families to those of wealthy and more-resourced families without taking into account structural barriers. While other research terms that sought to heighten awareness have shifted to highlight the systemic issues and (re)locate the challenge outside of the student (e.g., knowledge gap to opportunity gap), the term first gen has remained unchanged.
I can readily admit that up until last week I regularly used the term First Gen without critical reflection. Afterall, according to the meaning of the term, I am (or was) a first gen college graduate. Yet in celebrating Daughter’s Day, National Family Day, and Son’s Day, I reflected on my family — particularly the successes of my parents despite the challenges that they experienced when I was a youth. One of those successes is that my mother, at the age of 68, earned her associates degree with honors in 2018. Am I still first gen given my mother’s achievement? Which leads me to a larger question: does the term first gen marginalize the unrealized potential of families?” How might I have framed my college experience if I knew that my mother had the potential to earn her degree despite lacking the structural opportunity in the late 1960s?
ike others, my initial journey of college held the typical narrative that First Gen students have no family foundation in or experience with aspects of successes in education. The narrative situates the lack within families rather than acknowledging the systemic challenges that may have constrained parents from attaining levels of academic achievement. These narratives cast families as outside of the necessary support system, often creating in students a dissonance of whether their academic goals are “appropriate for students from families like their own.” However, as my own life suggests, many First Gen students come from families with the potential and possibility, just not the opportunity. When my mother returned to school to earn her AA, she recounted her experience of attempting to attend community college during the Civil Rights Unrest. Her education was grounded in the separate-an-unequal Jim Crow era. Within the contemporary context — wherein an advanced education was truly an accessible opportunity — my mother not only succeeded but thrived in her college courses. How does the narrative of First Gen provide room for this truth?
This is more than just an ephemeral thought. As both of my parents have survived the traumas of their childhood and young adult lives, I have come to learn and experience that our family has a legacy of writers: my dad has written his own biography, my mother has three volumes of song and praise lyrics, my older youngest brothers write rhymes and raps, and my younger brother has written a book and several editorials that have gone viral. I myself have written academic papers and journalistic articles. While I initially entered college as an English major with the idea that my family foundation could not support my goals of becoming a writer and English teacher, as my family has been able to realize its fuller potential, I have learned that words, writing, and communicating are central to my family’s talent.
As educational scholars have noted in critical studies, the way in which families are framed matter. When students understand that, regardless of current circumstances, their family has unrealized potential, they can engage educational spaces with a stronger sense of self. We owe it to students and their families to complete the move away from deficit language and toward naming the assets of families.
It is time to stop using the term First Gen.
