ROSCOE educators; faculty/peer mentoring for first generation education students

Abstract

First generation students are the first in their immediate family to attend college. This can include students with parents who did not complete a 4 year college degree in the United States or who completed a 4 year college degree later in life. Although first generation college students come from various economic backgrounds and social identities, they tend to be lower-income and students of color, often from economically-disinvested and racially-segregated areas whose “sending schools” have fewer resources than those in higher-income areas (Ishitani, 2006). Existing research suggests that first-generation students experience great stress and may not readily share their college-specific troubles (Barry et al., 2009; Jenkins et al., 2013). Glaessgen et al. (2018) write, “First-generation students lack the cultural capital of the university system that they enter, some to the extent of complete unawareness of the existence of a university system culture or the language that they are expected to know.” (p. 22) In this project, interviews of 18 first generation students in the School of Education at The College of New Jersey were conducted. Transcripts were coded in an effort to determine emerging themes and students experiences with mentoring. Analysis looked for emerging themes through open axial and selective coding.