First-generation students (first-gen) are those who are the first in their family to attend college. Though first-gen students come from diverse backgrounds and can’t be reduced to a single narrative, many share the experience of entering a space in which the institutional values diverge from those of their upbringing.
At the Claremont Colleges, this disparity can be daunting. Many first-gen students learn adaptability and resourcefulness out of necessity, including navigating academic institutions with unfamiliar norms.
“My first-gen identity has made me who I am,” Nina Ude PZ ’28, a student representative of the First Gen Steering Committee (FGSC), said. “It’s made me such a motivated person and also someone who wants to help other people too. We want to see each other succeed.”
College is fraught with competition both in and outside the classroom for all students, and it can be hard to form relationships without ulterior motives.
For Lisette Sanchez, a first-generation psychologist and former first-gen liaison at Harvey Mudd College, the first-gen community is the antithesis of the zero-sum mentality that so frequently characterizes college life.
“It’s [about] … just surviving and making it through together,” Sanchez said. “First-gens are applying and extending [the value of community and family] beyond the family unit. That’s when it’s really helpful.”
Across the 5Cs, first-gen mentorship programs are student-led, while most administrations run separate first-gen initiatives. Pomona College houses the First-Gen Low Income (FLI) Scholars which works closely with the head mentors of the student-run FLI Mentorship program; Claremont McKenna College is home to a student-run club 1Gen; Harvey Mudd administration’s “I’m a First” initiative collaborates with the student-run First-Gen Low Income Students at Harvey Mudd College (FLISHMC); First-Gen @ Scripps is a part of Scripps Communities of Resources and Empowerment (SCORE); Pitzer students established the First Gen Club after the founding of the administrative First-Gen Program. The Pitzer FGSC was then established in 2023-24 on a trial structure.
“My first-gen identity has made me who I am.”
Navigating college as a first-gen student
Collectivism is a double-edged sword. The competitive, zero-sum mentality within college coexists with the pressure that stems from familial duties.
“I’m not doing this just for me, I’m doing this for everyone younger than me, all my cousins … if I fail, then I’m setting this precedent that everyone’s failed,” Sanchez said. “There’s no room to make a mistake.”
Self-discovery and academic exploration are cardinal parts of the liberal arts experience. Many first-gen students, though, are children of immigrants, and may have been raised in households that devalue non-STEM or non-practical disciplines.
According to Sanchez, when students enter spaces where the dominant values diverge from those of their upbringing, they often experience cognitive dissonance.
“As a first-gen [college] student as well as the oldest sibling in my family, there is a really big pressure for me to graduate with a ‘respectable’ major and be very economically stable postgrad,” Nguyen said. “To support my family, to pursue that upward mobility … [has] restricted a lot of my friends from really taking advantage of the liberal arts college experience.”
Sanchez noted that many first-gen students undergo parentification, assuming adult responsibilities as children. Many students, for example, translate documents or help family members navigate unfamiliar systems.
While instrumental parentification can often build adaptability and communication skills, emotional parentification — feeling responsible for others’ emotions — can create lasting pressure. These pressures coexist with expectations for financial stability postgrad.
“I actually came in as a biology major,” Nguyen said. “And now I’m PPA-economics. I definitely struggled with it at first … I think a huge part of it was explaining it to my mom. I could not, for the life of me, translate what PPA was in Vietnamese … To explain [my major] to my mother who hasn’t had access to spaces like these before. It’s a lot harder, and for the longest time prevented me from making that transition to pursuing the academic interests that I wanted to.”
On-campus resources and funding for research and internship opportunities alleviate the burden of explanation for many students, especially non-STEM students, of first-gen and other marginalized groups.
“A lot of what made it easier for me was [that] I was really fortunate enough to find resources on campus that allowed me to pursue these passions,” Nguyen said.
Common narratives about first-gen students often frame their identity through struggle, whether as individuals constantly overcoming barriers like parentification, or as outsiders in unfamiliar spaces.
“I have realized that part of being first-gen comes with a lot of limiting beliefs, a lot of feeling less than, or feeling like we need to shrink certain parts of ourselves in order to be successful,” Sanchez said.
First-gen students may internalize these common narratives that focus only on the burdens, and not the joys, that students face.
“There’s always this narrative that we’re so resilient … because we had to do X, Y and Z to get here and that we’re going through X, Y and Z while we’re in college,” Angel Rodriguez PZ ’28, a Pitzer FGSC student representative, said. “Yes, while all of that is true … it goes beyond just our resilience.”
Sanchez emphasized the joy that comes with a community you know you can rely on and where you know other people can rely on you. She advises first-gen students to reframe things typically seen as weaknesses to be strengths.
Daniella Reyes CM ’26 and Anahi Ramos CM ’26 are vice presidents of 1Gen, which fills in gaps for first-gen students when navigating college socially, academically and professionally.
“I’m much more part of the community now,” Reyes said. “I used to run the diversity program at CMC … and when students [I mentored] came to campus it’s like, ‘Oh, let me help you, let me take care of you.’ It’s [become] part of a culture of giving back, that I wasn’t necessarily [a part of] before … I love my 1Gen community.”
At Mudd, “I’m a First” initiative programming includes dinner conversations, which Sanchez has led, as well as socials, study hours and joint events with the student-run FLISHMC.
In their efforts to expand access, Pomona, Scripps and CMC have also partnered with Questbridge, an organization that matches high-achieving, low-income high school students with colleges and universities across the United States.
With the transition from Quest Scholars to FLI Scholars in the 2017-18 academic year, FLI has expanded their resources and structured programming, according to FLI co-president Vicki Cao PO ’27.
Filling gaps for first-gen students
The number of first-generation students at the 5Cs has grown significantly over the years. However, elite institutions are not a space where first-generation and low-income students have historically been welcomed or accepted.
Many of these challenges are invisible to non-first-gen students, who often arrive already fluent in the institutional norms of higher education.
“Sometimes it’s not the easiest to go and text our parents and be like, ‘I’m having a hard time because of this’ because our parents didn’t go to college, so there’s like this sense that they don’t fully understand,” Rodriguez said. “And so I think being able to talk to an upperclassman … they see you because they were just in your place.”
Spaces like FLI Scholars not only provide support, mentorship and informal guidance, they also delineate “hidden curriculum” — institutional norms in elite higher education that, while not explicitly taught, students are expected to know already.
“It’s not about just showing up to class and doing the work, but it’s about building those relationships,” Rachel Nguyen PO ’26, co-president of FLI Scholars, said. “That’s an example of what a hidden curriculum looks like in education … if it’s not on the syllabi, you don’t know that that’s something that’s expected of you.”
These dissonances, Sanchez explained, also contribute to a sense of imposter syndrome from constantly feeling pressured to prove themselves.
First-gen groups take these struggles into account when developing programming, and provide resources in advance of the most stressful times in the semester.
“In previous years, we’ve done workshops on overcoming imposter syndrome and provided financial management courses so that even if our students don’t feel comfortable stating that they’re struggling or don’t feel like they belong, they at least know there are resources available,” Cao said.
Mentors like Reyes and Ramos also work to counteract this uncertainty by encouraging students to assert their place on campus.
“[I ensure] they feel assured in their ability to make a space for themselves,” Reyes said. “Because you’re here to … tap into the people around you. Ultimately, [the dean of students] is there to listen and be your voice.”
Both student-run first-gen spaces and administrative programs work to counter the dissonances that come from the hidden curriculum and other challenges.
At Pitzer, for example, first-gen students are supported by the First-Gen Program, the First Gen Club and the recently founded FGSC.
Pitzer’s administration established FGSC in the 2023–24 academic year as a trial structure. FGSC arose following tensions between the administration-run First-Gen Program and student-run First Gen Club. In September 2023, Pitzer laid off two First-Gen program interns due to insufficient funding, sparking student protests.
Per demands that the student-run First Gen Club outlined in a letter to Pitzer administration after the firings, the committee is comprised of two student representatives — Rodriguez and Ude — as well as Former Associate Dean and professor Phil Zuckerman, Assistant Vice President Alayna Session-Goins, and Division of Student Affairs staff members Tasmia Moosani and Shelva Paulse. The committee also manages an enhanced budget for academic and co-curricular support and upholds a structure in which the First Gen Club and First-Gen Program are separate.
“[These firings] send a message to the first-gen student community at Pitzer College that our needs are not prioritized and that we are deemed expendable in the face of performativity,” the letter states.
FGSC works with the First Gen Club and First-Gen Program. Former co-presidents of the First Gen Club, Rodriguez and Ude develop programming and communicate student concerns to committee administration, faculty and staff members. They noted that the committee members respect their positionality, though the concerns of the college and those of students may not align at times.
“We’re these student interns, but also we’re just students,” Rodriguez said. “I think that can get lost sometimes. We’re literally experiencing the struggles that others are reading about. We’re bringing up these concerns because we’re experiencing them ourselves.”
Keenly aware that many mentorship programs lose momentum as the school year progresses, FGSC, First Gen Club and other 5C first-gen clubs make efforts to tailor mentoring around student needs throughout the semester and innovate methods.
“Our main goal was to stay true to our promise to our mentors and mentees — that we’re going to prioritize this program and we want to see it succeed, so we’re going to invest in it,” Ude said. “[Mentoring] is a great introduction to the first-gen community, especially for first-years.”
They highlighted FirstGen Voices, a semester-long publication originally launched by the First Gen Club. The initiative pairs students with first-gen faculty mentors to create a reflective piece — like a poem, song, artwork or essay — which is compiled in a book.
“There’s a piece of everybody in that book,” Rodriguez said. “The one-on-one conversations with your first-gen faculty mentor are [the kind of] conversations that are going to last a lifetime.”
Supporting social and educational connections
College is as much about social access as it is education. Critics have observed that the elite class has its own set of social rules, and that access to that social sphere — both in and after college — depends on networking with people who are already in it.
These ambitions hover in the background of elite higher education. 25 percent of students at Pomona come from independent schools, for example.
Colleges across America have gotten increasingly pre-professional and many see college as the pathway to a lucrative job. Even under H.R. 1, also known as the Big Beautiful Bill, degree programs with low-paying jobs will lose access to federal funding.
First-gen organizations have recognized these evolving needs and strengthened their alumni networking programs in response. CMC’s 1Gen and Pomona’s FLI both started as community spaces, but eventually expanded programming to include more professional development.
“[Many students] come to CMC not really knowing what professional opportunities look like,” Reyes said. “Our mentor, at one point, [said] she was going into consulting and I was like, ‘I still don’t know what that is.’”
Close relationships with first-gen leaders and staff are crucial for sustaining these efforts. Cao noted that when there are disputes between students and administrators, FLI’s presidents relay feedback to Daniel Caballero, Pomona’s assistant director for first-generation and undocumented student programs, who advocates for their needs to upper-level administration.
For example, 1Gen recently held a faculty-student mixer made possible by close relationships with staff members like Priscilla Cobian, assistant director of first year programming at the Soll Center for Student Opportunity.
“This year, the support for 1Gen from … CMC staff, administrators, etc. They’ve been very on it,” Reyes said. “We’ve been involved for a while, but we both felt a noticeable difference in the people who are reaching out for us to collab with events.”
Pitzer’s FGSC established a similar faculty-student initiative that allows first-gen students to connect with first-gen professors and allies.
“It makes all the difference to know that [faculty] want to work with us and it’s not always us having to advocate for ourselves,” Rodriguez said. “[To know] that they are doing it because they want to, not that they need to check a box.”
Relationships with faculty extend beyond academic or post-graduation mentoring. They can also provide forms of personal support that might otherwise be out of reach.
“What we often forget is that faculty and staff are such a huge part of our community here as well,” Nguyen said. “From going to office hours … I have been able to go to their homes for Thanksgiving, which I’m not able to go home for, or get a coffee in the Village, which is super expensive.”
Ramos’s 1Gen mentor, for instance, helped her find professional resources and possibilities, leading her to discover a career path she hadn’t previously considered.
“[The expectation] at CMC especially is that you must have a summer internship, and the resources my mentors provided really helped me,” Ramos said. “[Mentorship] changed my whole mentality.”
In addition to mentorship from their peers, Ude noted that many FLI students have close connections with staff members, including facilities workers and dining hall staff, many of whom are immigrants themselves.
“[Staff] feel a sense of pride for you that you may not necessarily receive from faculty,” Rodriguez said. “It’s like, ‘I see you and I know it’s hard’ … [That] emotional support goes such a long way.”
Maintaining spaces for first-gen students
In November 2023, Pomona administration moved FLI Scholars, Latinx Alliance and the Black Student Union from the Smith Campus Center’s (SCC) second floor to a U-shaped space in the SCC basement.
FLI protested against the move by starting a petition, gathering student testimonies and reaching out to administrators to gather opinions.
“I was just really impressed by the amount of care and passion that the FLI community puts in whenever there are issues that don’t resonate with our values,” Cao said. “The fact that we even got the petition started, we had those open discussions and we worked together as a community in trying to get our side of the story heard — that was really powerful in itself.”
Dealing with the basement move and its challenges has, in some ways, ended up bringing the FLI community closer, Cao noted, evident in increased involvement and event turnout from first-years and upperclassmen.
“We’ve circumvented and problem-solved, and so we’ve tried to do collaborations with other affinity groups to kind of make ourselves more seen and heard,” Nguyen said.
Significance of access initiatives for first-gen students
Besides these resources, spaces and initiatives for FLI students at the 5Cs focus not only on students after they matriculate, but also on increasing access and enrollment.
Nguyen, for example, attended Perspectives in Pomona (POP) in the spring of her senior year of high school. POP is an access program that flies in high school students from underrepresented backgrounds to Pomona, with the intention of “recruiting and admitting diverse groups of students.” From her POP cohort, Nguyen said, 80 out of 100 students matriculated.
Other access initiatives for low-income and first-gen students include Upward Bound, Mudd’s program for high school sophomores, as well as fly-in programs offered by the other colleges.
“To identify yourself as a FLI student is a very individual choice,” Nguyen said. “I’m someone who’s very vocal about it, but that’s not something that applies to everyone. It is something that defines how I move throughout the school and the spaces that I occupy day to day.”
First-gen students’ visibility depends in large part on institutional backing.
“People are aware of FLI and its community,” Nguyen said. “A lot of FLI students will go into housing and residence life — a lot of FLI students will go into tour guiding. And I think those are both places where the priorities and the current events of FLI are amplified greatly, but I think the College could do more in supporting its FLI students’ visibility.”
POP and other programs that center on increasing access for FLI students currently come into focus amidst waves of anti-DEI legislation across the country, including crackdowns on colleges’ recruitment of underrepresented students.
“[Pomona] is getting better and better at recognizing first-gen, low-income students,” Cao said. “They try to have representation at events such as the scholarship luncheon, where they invite donors, and they’ll always make sure at least one FLI student is represented.”
“It felt really nice to know that the school recognizes our presence and is actively reaching out to ensure our stories and experiences are acknowledged,” she said.
Nguyen, Cao and others noted that institutional support, protection and resources for FLI students are increasingly important right now, in the wake of legislation like H.R.1 that leave some students more vulnerable.
On Jul. 4, H.R. 1 was signed into law, enacting significant amendments to the Higher Education Act, which governs federal student financial aid. Under the new law, students whose total aid equals or exceeds the cost of attendance may lose Pell Grant eligibility. The legislation also ties institutional eligibility for federal student loans to graduates’ post-college earnings.
Pomona President Gabi Starr, Former Pomona Acting President Robert Gaines and Pitzer President Strom C. Thacker have all issued statements noting relief from the prior flat endowment tax but warning that cuts to Medicaid and new accountability formulas could indirectly harm first-generation and low-income students.
Though the bill is purportedly an efficiency measure to address the projected funding shortfall, the bill’s provisions could disproportionately impact FLI students, many of whom work multiple jobs and balance family obligations.
“More vocal support for FLI students, as well as opposition to those actions, such as striking down our protections and our rights, would be appreciated,” Nguyen said.
Common narratives and studies on the first-gen experience are not equipped to describe the varied and constantly changing experiences of first-gen students.
“Instead of assuming that all FLI students think or feel the same way, it can be more meaningful to get to know people individually, to understand how their backgrounds shape the way they view success, community and identity,” Jesse Chippendale PO ’26, former co-president of FLI Scholars, said. “That kind of openness could build a strong connection, instead of ‘othering’ FLI students as a specific rigid group.”
“[My first-gen identity] encompasses so many things that it’s hard to not be proud to be first-gen,” Rodriguez said.
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