Definitions & Research

First-Generation
- First-generation college student at Northwestern refers to any student whose parents haven’t graduated from a four-year university or college.
National Coverage
- I Can't Understand Financial Aid Letters, and I have an Advanced Degree. So, How Can Poor Students Manage? (The Hechinger Report, August 2017)
- An Underground College for Undocumented Immigrants (The New Yorker, May 2017)
- The Aristrocracy That Let Me In (Stanford Politics, June 2017)
- College Makes Sense for the Elite, But it Might Not Work for the Working Class, LinkedIn (May 2017)
- Some Mass. Colleges Move to Cover Extra Costs of a Degree for Poorer Students (Edify, July 2017)
- The unique challenges of a first-generation college student (Quartz, June 2015)
- Widening Wealth Gap (Inside Higher Ed, May 2015)
- First Generation Students Unite (The New York Times, April 2015)
- Coming Out as Poor at an Elite University (State of Opportunity, January 2015)
- What We Can Learn from First Generation College Students (Time Magazine, April 2012)
- What is it like to be poor at an Ivy League School? (The Boston Globe, April 2015)
Scholarly Articles
- Closing the Social Class Achievement Gap (PDF) (Association for Psychological Science, 2014)
- Middle Class and Marginal? Socioeconomic Status, Stigma, and Self-Regulation at an Elite University (PDF)