Work Hard

Chapter 4 describes first-generation students in a Work Hard geography. These academically engaged students made not only classes and homework central to their daily lives, but their friendships and social lives also were often rooted in either academic work and/or nonathletic extracurricular interests. Work Hard students report close faculty relationships and strong friendships, often with those from similar demographic backgrounds, but they are also lonely outside those spheres, avoiding the high-status social hubs of campus. Most students in this geography came through Summer Bridge, and much of their campus engagement is in reaction to the racism, classism, and sexism they feel and observe on campus. They have created friendship communities that provide affirmation and support and crafted geographies that link their social, extracurricular, and academic priorities. The overlap of these spaces provides a buffer but does not connect these students to wealthier peers.

Connecting to Post-College Life and Locating Success

Chapter 7 shows how campus geographies expose students to different models of success (or not) and shape their strategies for attaining that success. Play Hard students learn early not to prioritize academic outcomes above friendships and social life but rather to focus on building powerful networks with more affluent friends through parties, team sports, and Greek Life. Work Hard students, by contrast, remain in more class-segregated spaces, meaning they have less exposure to peers with upper-class habituses. They prioritize building their formal resume, connections with faculty, and having high grade point averages, which guide their decisions both academically and in terms of the kinds of extracurricular opportunities they seek out. Multisphere students rely on both academic and network strategies and seem to be comfortable navigating each, while Disconnected students struggle to locate a clear and consistent route toward post-college success and plan to rely on themselves.

Multisphere

Chapter 5 focuses on Multisphere students who incorporated elements from both Work Hard and Play Hard geographies, balancing serious academic work, strong extracurricular involvement, and social lives in high-status venues. Most Multisphere students arrived on campus through targeted orientation programs. While these led to early and lasting friendships, Multisphere respondents’ campus acclimation processes are distinguished by a pattern of branching out, locating strong peer ties in varied social locations. The way that students in this geography float among different spheres, able to be comfortable and successful in each, makes this the most fluid of the campus geographies. There are few first-generation students in this geography, and the authors think of them in some ways as being both outliers and examples of what is possible for first-generation students.

Disconnected

Chapter 6 provides an overview of students in a Disconnected geography. Consistent with previous research, the largest portion of the National Longitudinal Survey of Freshmen sample are Disconnected. These students, while academically motivated and interested in a social life, struggled to make connections or find a niche, whether through classes, clubs, or social circles. One important commonality among Disconnected respondents was a delay in forming friendships: These students could not form early connections and described how difficult it was to make friends after the initial rush of being new together with other first-year students. Most students in Disconnected geographies did not participate in a substantial precollege program, wading into campus life on their own. Many of our Disconnected respondents were unhappy and unable to locate comfortable spaces on campus, in some cases despite long-term efforts to find a sense of belonging.

Conclusion

Chapter 8 recaps the primary takeaways and discusses their implications for selective campuses. While campuses and scholarly literature generally treat first-generation students as a cohesive whole, this book speaks to a much more complicated process whereby students’ intersectional identities and preferences work along with institutional structures to sort first-generation students into one of several campus geographies that then lead to different types of connections with faculty, peers, extracurricular activities, and social engagements. Campus geographies are important because they provide informal social knowledge, tools, resources, and inclinations that may be more or less helpful both in college and as they prepare for post-college life. The authors close by discussing the implications of this research for selective colleges wishing to support a range of first-generation students more successfully.

First-Generation Students at Selective Colleges

Chapter 2 provides a portrait of first-generation students who attend selective colleges by placing them in comparison with continuing-generation students, the dominant demographic group on these campuses. This chapter focuses on students’ high school backgrounds—the ways they get to college—and then discusses briefly the ways this background leads them into an initial institutional sorting process. While first-generation students share a similarly strong high school academic profile as their continuing-generation counterparts, they come of age within very different contexts. The authors show that some of these differences have implications for how first-generation students identify connections on campus during the first few weeks of college. Moreover, first-generation students find themselves in somewhat different campus geographies than continuing-generation at the end of their first year of college. First-generation are more likely to be Disconnected than their continuing-generation peers and less embedded in campus geographies connected to mainstream social life (Play Hard and Multisphere).

Play Hard

Chapter 3 focuses on first-generation students who fit a Play Hard geography. Although academic achievement is important for many Play Hard students, it is less of a driver in students’ lives than for those in other geographies. Students arrange their lives more around leisure, participating in high-status social venues of athletics and/or Greek Letter Organizations where they meet more peers from more affluent and continuing-generation families than those in other geographies. Most who entered a Play Hard geography participate in athletics and/or attended a private high school. The small percentage of first-generation students who make their way into a Play Hard geography includes the greatest variation of experience along gender and racialized lines. Students located in a Play Hard geography experience varying levels of comfort, often participating at a steep cost to their sense of self-esteem or enjoyment.

More Than One Way to Be First

Chapter 1 introduces the reader to existing research on first-generation college students and argues that institutions need to learn more about the heterogeneity among first generation students to better serve this population. The authors describe their three broad questions: First, what are the different ways that first-generation students organize their social, extracurricular, and academic lives at selective and highly selective colleges? Second, how do first generation students sort themselves and get sorted into these different types of campus lives? Third, how do these different patterns of campus engagement prepare first-generation students for their post-college lives? The authors then provide an overview of their arguments and explain how their concept of campus geographies provides a new and useful lens. Finally, they describe their methods and provide an overview of the chapters in the book.