As a first-gen student (and I had no adults in my family in any generation who had ever attended a four-year college), I absolutely would have hired a college admissions counselor if I had had the money for the same reason. My parents didn’t know anything about the maze of college admissions even back in 2003-2004 - my mother had attended a technical school to get an LPN for nursing, and my dad had taken a few community college courses, but neither is helpful experience when trying to get admitted to a four-year college - especially when money is a chief consideration.
Mmm, maybe, although it depends a lot on the trade license itself (cosmetologists, for example, don’t necessarily make money comparable to a college degree). But I don’t think that’s the point: I thought the original point is that college graduate parents can give their children a lot more guidance and institutional knowledge than ones who didn’t go. My husband and I are both first-generation but we both now have four-year degrees, and if we ever have kids they will be in a completely different boat than we were.
First of all, they’ll be raised expecting to go to college, which in and of itself is a big changed mindset that makes a big difference (I didn’t decide to go to college until the end of my junior year, and I had no idea what the admissions process looked like - I thought if you wanted to go to Harvard and you had the money, you just went.) We know what steps you have to take in order to apply - what tests, and how often you should practice them and when; that these things cost money and there are fees you need to save for; that providing our tax forms for the school is part of the process and not The Man trying to steal our identity. (My parents had a hard time releasing their financial information for me, and I didn’t apply to any schools that had the CSS PROFILE because I couldn’t afford it and originally thought it was a scam, since I was taught financial aid forms were supposed to be free.) And those are just the first things I thought of off the top of my head.
Of course things change in the 20 or so years between the time you go and the time your kids go, but the basic structure is the same.
That’s why I think that it’s who raised you in the household that should count, not distant or dead relatives. It’s weird that a college would “count” a parent who died before you were verbal (do they think college admissions knowledge passes by heritability?) On the other hand, I think grandparents are a gray area…their involvement in your life is really variable depending on the family.