This fall, 16 percent of students at Macalester are among the first in their family to attend college.
They come from all kinds of backgrounds: rural and urban, BIPOC and white, immigrant and U.S.-born, low income and solidly middle class. They’re just as academically and intellectually prepared as students with a family history of college attendance. But they often need a little extra help with the information that students whose parents earned a degree absorbed by osmosis: the vocabulary of higher education and the shortcuts and secret handshakes that make it easier to navigate a complex institution. Getting into college isn’t the same as feeling like you belong there.
“There’s been a national endeavor to provide access to first-generation college students,” says Sedric McClure, assistant dean of multicultural life. “First, institutions began to recognize that high achieving students were admissible to highly selective institutions but didn’t have the resources to enter into the space. So, that became a focus. Then, we began to see the emergence, in significant numbers, of first-generation college students in these spaces. But what does that mean for creating a sense of belonging?”
Feature originally appeared in the Macalester College alumni magazine, Mac Today.