In other words, first generation to BA/BS students are underrepresented at all colleges compared to K-12 schools, and even at colleges like UC and CSU that make an effort to get more of them into college.
As you’re obviously aware, K-12 in this country can be pretty segregated. It’s not that hard to find schools where 90%+ of the student body has parents who are college-educated and vice versa.
You might see if your s is interested in joining a social media group for freshman at the school. He might enjoy it and you might feel better seeing those great kiddos. Sometimes things are more intimidating in the abstract.
If the OP’s student’s high school is such a bubble, college frosh year is as good a time as any to take a peek outside of that bubble – although the first generation to BA/BS students in a four year college may not be completely representative of all whose parents do not have BA/BS degrees, including those who do not go to college or those who go to college but do not seek BA/BS degrees.
For reference, no I don’t think it’s a bubble like that at all. The student body is diverse and represents both affluent and lower income families. I don’t know the rate of parents with college degrees. The only statistic I can find that has some bearing is 15% economically disadvantaged. While that doesn’t prove anything, I doubt that anything like 90% of the families have at least one parent with a college degree. However, it ranks fairly high among Bay Area high schools.
Nonetheless, I think that’s a valid point, and my son has expressed interest in seeing life outside Silicon Valley.
It could be because of the social situation or it could be because of trouble finding intellectual peers (probably more of an issue at UCM than UCR). Or both.
“Economically disadvantaged” in a K-12 context often means “eligible for free or reduced price lunch”. This appears to be a somewhat lower income level than Pell grant eligibility; UCR has about 51% of frosh with Pell grants, so it likely has a greater percentage of students from below-median-income families than the high school, even if the high school’s Pell grant eligible students (if they went to college) are more than the 15% “economically disadvantaged”.
That sounds plausible. My point was just that it’s not a really elite school, and draws from a district with both affluent and lower income areas, so the 90% parents with college degrees seems unlikely. The number going to UCR is pretty low, but that’s partly because it’s in Southern California. Of the schools my son got into, I think it’s the best choice, but I have to admit that neither of us considered it carefully when applying.
It’s quite common for persons on this forum to be concerned about students whose scores are higher/lower than the college’s average or have some relationship to their childrens’ scores, but this is the first I’ve heard about being concerned about having a high first gen ratio or better off peers losing confidence to lower SES peers excelling.
As a general rule, both higher SES kids and lower SES kids tend to be successful, but the higher SES tend to have a little better outcomes than lower SES kids on average. This pattern occurs at UCR. You can find some specific numbers from a few years ago in the Chetty study at Economic diversity and student outcomes at U.C. Riverside - The New York Times .
The report mentions that “rich kids” at UCR averaged a 69th percentile income later in life compared to 64th percentile income for "poor kids. If I instead compare to USC as an example wealthier college in CA, the Chetty study repot states “rich kids” at USC averaged a 72nd percentile income later in life compared to 69th percentile income for "poor kids. Both UCR and USC showed the same pattern with rich kids having slightly better outcomes than poor kids, and showed similar average earnings.
The above study only looks at kids who graduated. If you compare rate of graduating, the differences are often more stark at both UCR and USC. However, this largely relates to wealthy kids being less likely to need to leave school for financial or family reasons.
In short, I’ve never seen any evidence to suggest that higher SES kids or kids who are not first gen are worse off than disadvantaged kids, regardless of the college. Higher SES kids tend to have excellent outcomes on average., There are certainly individual students who will not succeed and some that may struggle for a variety of reasons, including peer influences. I don’t know your son, but I’ve never personally heard of a particular student struggling for the discussed reasons, so I wouldn’t expect it to be likely.
Thanks. This sounds very interesting and I will take a look. I had to look up “SES”. OK, socioeconomic status. I just never saw the acronym before.
What you say makes sense. I am projecting a lot of my own anxiety here. How would I feel if I thought I was “settling” or had failed to get into a school my peers with same advantages got into? In reality, I actually really liked going to a public university where I thought I could keep ahead of the partiers academically. However, there were a couple of things, like being in an honors program, which my son won’t be, that salved my ego. I also knew it was what my family could afford.
My son is not me. Thus, most of these anxieties are misguided. I can only speculate whether he feels it’s a fit. To be clear, I’m very excited and proud to be sending my son off to college. I wish I had more I could do to help at this point. Part of the reason my mind wanders is that aside from some long shot waitlist possibilities, there’s nothing for him to do but finish high school and take a couple of AP exams. Nothing is really going to change his prospects but I’m still running the contest in my head.
I wish I had seen that study earlier. One of the things I find fascinating is that some of the CSUs I would consider less selective have students from significantly higher income families. One of the choices my son had was between UCR and SDSU. We drove down and took a look. Of course, both campuses were nearly deserted for the pandemic, but I would definitely describe SDSU as a “tonier” campus and environment. Neither my son nor I were persuaded that he’d like it any better there, however. (I can’t speak for my son, but I took a genuine liking to the UCR campus, which felt very rough and ready, particularly for science and agriculture.)
It was interesting to me to see how different UCR and UCSC are when it comes to family income. I lump them together as roughly the same caliber of UC, but clearly something is different.
Some campuses do attract students as “destination” campuses, which can be a luxury for those from higher income parents (lower income parents may only have enough money for their students to commute to a local school, particularly with CSUs which do not change financial aid based on living situation). SDSU seems to be much more of a “destination” campus than UCR. On the other hand, few students look to CSUB, CSUDH, CSULA, CSUN, CSUStan, or CSUSB as “destination” campuses. Of course, the relative wealth or poverty in the local area also has to do with how high or low income the parents of local students are.
One that surprised me even more in the Chetty study was Sonoma State. It was my son’s safety school, but the median family income is very high according to the study. I imagine it’s nice there, but the only way we would have given it serious consideration is if he didn’t get in anywhere else.
Football (SDSU being a strong MWC team) is the obvious differentiator between those two, in addition to SDSU being in a nicer coastal location (which is presumably what boosts UCSC).
PAC-12 football plays a major role in OOS choices for wealthy students in CA: Utah and CU Boulder knew what they were doing was about more than just sports when joining to become PAC-12 instead of PAC-10. Few people would pay the expensive OOS costs at Oregon compared to cheaper WUE rates elsewhere if Oregon’s sports teams weren’t strong (thanks to all that Nike money).
I get it. It was very hard to swallow that this was the worst year ever to apply to college and your kid is ending up somewhere unexpected. Results were unpredictable and felt uneven. College is very important to us. Also tough to avoid thinking about the WL and love the 5/1 school as advised. You aren’t alone but we have to make the best of it and expect them to thrive. My kid is like yours, very chill and not crushed by losing a dream school. I feel really grateful since I know other parents have said their kids had a much harder time accepting the results. At least on the outside we’ll move forward with the celebrating! There is much to be grateful for and they will get a solid education.
Why would this matter? There are schools that mention their sports teams as a selling point but don’t expect everyone to be an athlete.
Plus, what difference does it make that any students are first generation. I say this as a first generation student who went to college way before this was a “thing”. I doubt anyone cared about the educations of my parents and other ancestors.
This is entirely an adults-only problem. Eighteen year-olds do not generally think in terms of how much money their friends parents make or whether they had college degrees. The fact that everyone he meets wound up in the same college should provide all the common ground DS needs. Honestly, have things changed that much since we were kids?
In fact, what I actually tell him is: no matter where you go to school, it’s going to be amazing. You’ll be away from home, living in a new place, and meeting new people. And I believe that because it lines up with my own experience.
However, none of this stops me from lying awake at night sometimes wondering if we should have done something different. While I know we all experienced the same pandemic year, it really disrupted things. His extracurriculars in high school were kind of weak, though he did some aquatics. He had something lined up for summer 2020 that I think could have helped but of course we were locked down. Actually, I think his SATs, which he took early in 11th grade, looked better than his grades (his counselor said they were about par) but UC didn’t look at them this year. At least it saved us a big waste of time with a prep course to boost them on a second try. I am proud of the score he got by preparing entirely on his own from free materials.
So… whine whine whine… I know. It has been a tricky year. I honestly had no idea where he’d be accepted and we did a good job picking a range of schools for which he got accepted, waitlisted, and rejected at one reach (UCSB).
You are absolutely right that this is my parental anxiety and not his at all.
Honestly my daughter couldn’t tell you what most of her friend’s parents do for a living if her life depended on it. She knows one is a doctor because her friend calls him for medical advice for all the roomies on occasion. That’s it. Most know her dad’s job but that’s because military life is baked into her entire childhood and identity. No one talks about their parents colleges/careers/money really at all.