Engineered: July 2020

Since the new academic year at SMU will start in exactly one month, I wanted to write a quick post about some of the articles that have recently most caught my attention. Since both my parents came out of poverty into comfortable middle class through education alone, I find myself particularly drawn to articles about the plight of first-generation and low-income college students, which was for instance detailed in The Chronicle of Higher Education last week. It is easy to assume that every student will have a decent laptop and a good Internet connection to watch Zoom lectures, but this is not always the case. (Or, as an interviewee put it: "you can’t be a student taking full classes trying to do homework outside of Starbucks.") The relationships first-generation students make in college - friendships with other students of different socioeconomic backgrounds or mentoring by faculty members as well as access to alumni networks - also are likely to play a bigger role in their future success, since they won't be able to rely on their relatives to help them find an internship or introduce them to the right people.

Some of the issues raised in the article are that first-generation students may lose "the ability to interact with professors in person, as many students may not feel comfortable asking for help if they have not built an in-person connection. Others may not be aware that asking for help is an option, as many students learn by watching their peers." Further, "the process of navigating a college education, already intimidating for a first-generation student, is likely to become more isolating if classes remain online this fall."

The article emphasizes how important it is for first-generation students to develop a "sense of belonging" in order for them to be successful academically, "and online classes may mean less access to clubs, doing research with a professor, and other outside-the-classroom opportunities that shape the college experience" such as "attend[ing] sports games, join[ing] in-person clubs, or socializ[ing] with other students in “traditional” settings." First-generation students may not be able to attend virtual socializing opportunities, because of a part-time job or full-time job or caretaking responsibilities that other students do not have.

While a USC professor quoted in the article states that "institutions haven’t set up structures to help first-generation students who often come from lower-income backgrounds", SMU is trying to do just that, for instance through the Rotunda Scholars program and Mustang Mentors. Yet, much remains to be done. In particular, the Rotunda Scholars program currently only lasts the first year of the students' academic experience, to give them a good start. While targeted, early support is certainly better than sprinkling tiny amounts of help across all four years or more of a student's college experience (if he doesn't drop out), what happens in the second year? Students still have a long way before they graduate. In particular, I wonder what will happen to last year's Rotunda Scholars who are now out of the program and didn't have the full on-campus experience in the spring, although I hear they made full use of Zoom. Wouldn't it be a key year to expand the program to a second year? It is universities' moral responsibility to do whatever they can to help first-generation students in college during the COVID-19 pandemic to have the same life-changing college experience than cohorts in other years.