Educated
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Meeting Date |
What We Will Discuss |
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September 8, 2025 @ 11:00a - 12:00p | In-Person Ellis Library 114a |
Some copies of Educated available for pickup. |
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September 22, 2025 @ 11:00a - 12:00p | Zoom |
Identifying First-Generation College Students: Definitions, Data, and Data Use First-Generation College Students' Career Entry: College Perspectives |
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October 6, 2025 @ 11:00a - 12:00p | Zoom |
Educated - Part 1 |
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October 20, 2025 @ 11:00a - 12:00p | Zoom |
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November 3, 2025 @ 11:00a - 12:00p | Zoom |
Educated - Part 2 |
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November 17, 2025 @ 11:00a - 12:00p | Zoom |
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December 1, 2025 @ 11:00a - 12:00p | Zoom |
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December 15, 2025 @ 11:00a - 12:00p | Zoom |
Educated - Part 3 |
A Hope in the Unseen
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The inspiring true story of a ferociously determined young man who, armed only with his intellect and his willpower, fights his way out of despair. At Ballou Senior High, a crime-infested school in Washington, D.C., honor students have learned to keep their heads down. Among the mere handful of students with a B average or better, some plead to have their names left off the "Wall of Honor" bulletin board; others hide during awards ceremonies; only a few dare to raise their hands in class. Like most inner-city kids, they know that any special attention in a place this dangerous can make you a target of violence. But Cedric Jennings, the lanky son of a jailed drug dealer, will not swallow his pride, though each day he struggles to decide who he wants to be. With unwavering support from his mother, he studies and strives as if his life depends on it--and it does. The summer after his junior year, at a program for minorities at MIT, he gets a fleeting glimpse of life outside Ballou--an image that burns in his mind afterward and fills him with a longing to live in such a world. In his senior year, walking a gauntlet of sneers and threats, he achieves a 4.02 grade-point average and then the impossible: acceptance into Brown University, an Ivy League school. At Brown, finding himself far behind most of the other freshmen in his academic training and his knowledge of broader culture, Cedric must manage a bewildering array of intellectual and social challenges. Cedric had hoped that at college he would finally find a place to fit in, but he discovers he has little in common with the white students, many of whom come from privileged backgrounds and party hard while acing tests. Even the middle-class blacks have trouble understanding Cedric, a straight-arrow church kid from the ghetto who seems like an obvious product of affirmative action. As he struggles to master classwork and think like a scholar, he realizes that faith alone can take him only so far. Having traveled too far to turn back, Cedric is left to rely on his intelligence and his determination to keep alive his hope in the unseen--a future of acceptance and reward that he struggles, each day, to envision. Ron Suskind first wrote about Cedric Jennings in a pair of articles for the Wall Street Journal, which later won the Pulitzer Prize. Now, having spent three years at Cedric's side, Suskind delivers a triumphant coming-of-age odyssey that includes us all. Eye-opening, sometimes humorous, and often deeply moving, A Hope in the Unseen weaves a crucial new thread into the rich and ongoing narrative of the American experience.
First-Generation Women College Students Starving to Matter: Revealing the Lived Experience of a Student Population in Crisis
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"This book seeks to highlight the unique challenges first-generation women college students face in their goal to persist and persevere. Obstacles in the form of inadequate mental health supports, food, and housing insecurities can undermine their efforts"-- Provided by publisher.
The Hidden Curriculum
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A revealing look at the experiences of first generation students on elite campuses and the hidden curriculum they must master in order to succeed College has long been viewed as an opportunity for advancement and mobility for talented students regardless of background. Yet for first generation students, elite universities can often seem like bastions of privilege, with unspoken academic norms and social rules. The Hidden Curriculum draws on more than one hundred in-depth interviews with students at Harvard and Georgetown to offer vital lessons about the challenges of being the first in the family to go to college, while also providing invaluable insights into the hurdles that all undergraduates face. As Rachel Gable follows two cohorts of first generation students and their continuing generation peers, she discovers surprising similarities as well as striking differences in their college experiences. She reveals how the hidden curriculum at legacy universities often catches first generation students off guard, and poignantly describes the disorienting encounters on campus that confound them and threaten to derail their success. Gable shows how first-gens are as varied as any other demographic group, and urges universities to make the most of the diverse perspectives and insights these talented students have to offer. The Hidden Curriculum gives essential guidance on the critical questions that university leaders need to consider as they strive to support first generation students on campus, and demonstrates how universities can balance historical legacies and elite status with practices and policies that are equitable and inclusive for all students.
First in the Family: Your College Years
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A companion to First in the Family: Your High School Years, this next-step guidebook straight from their peers tells first-generation college students how to stay in college and graduate.
First Gen
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*2X NATIONAL BESTSELLER* Winner of the Martin Cruz Smith Award (CALIBA) Winner of the Dolores Huerta Award (International Latino Book Awards) 2024 Council for Opportunity in Education National Book Club Selection Longlisted for the Outstanding Works of Literature (OWL) Award for First Year Experience An unflinching memoir and "invaluable resource" (Kirkus) about navigating social mobility as a first gen Latina--offering both a riveting personal story and an examination of the unacknowledged emotional tolls of being a trailblazer. Alejandra Campoverdi has been a child on welfare, a White House aide to President Obama, a Harvard graduate, a gang member's girlfriend, and a candidate for U.S. Congress. She's ridden on Air Force One and in G-rides. She's been featured in Maxim magazine and had a double mastectomy. Living a life of contradictory extremes often comes with the territory when you're a "First and Only." It also comes at a price. With candor and heart, Alejandra retraces her trajectory as a Mexican American woman raised by an immigrant single mother in Los Angeles. Foregoing the tidy bullet points of her resume and instead shining a light on the spaces between them, what emerges is a powerful testimony that shatters the one-dimensional glossy narrative we are often sold of what it takes to achieve the American Dream. In this timely and revealing reflection, Alejandra draws from her own experiences to name and frame the challenges First and Onlys often face, illuminating a road to truth, healing, and change in the process. Part memoir, part manifesto, FIRST GEN is a story of generational inheritance, aspiration, and the true meaning of belonging--a gripping journey to "reclaim the parts of ourselves we sacrificed in order to survive."
The Indispensable Guide to Undergraduate Research
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Despite all of the information that exists to encourage students to attend and do well in college, this is the first research-based guide that directly advises first- and second-year college students. With a focus on the needs and interests of students who are underrepresented in the academy (African American, Latinx, low-income, and first-generation students), this book will help all students take full advantage of the academic resources that the university setting has to offer. The authors introduce students to different types of research across the disciplines, showing them how to work with professors to build a course of study, how to integrate research work into coursework, and how to write and present research. This timely volume will also assist faculty, staff, and parents in providing the needed tools to promote student success. Book Features: Prepares students for the transition from high school to college with a focus on writing, time management, and research skills. Addresses the challenges that face high-achieving, underrepresented students. Empowers students to seek out resources and research opportunities to achieve their full academic potential. Includes models, approaches, student voices, and vignettes from the authors' successful undergraduate research program.
The Journey Before Us
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More students are enrolling in college than ever before in U.S. history. Yet, many never graduate. In The Journey Before Us, Laura Nichols examines why this is by sharing the experiences of aspiring first-generation college students as they move from middle-school to young adulthood. By following the educational trajectories and transitions of Latinx, mainly second-generation immigrant students and analyzing national data, Nichols explores the different paths that students take and the factors that make a difference. The interconnected role of schools, neighborhoods, policy, employment, advocates, identity, social class, and family reveal what must change to address the "college completion crisis." Appropriate for anyone wanting to understand their own educational journey as well as students, teachers, counselors, school administrators, scholars, and policymakers, The Journey Before Us outlines what is needed so that education can once again be a means of social mobility for those who would be the first in their families to graduate from college.
On the Borders of the Academy
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One of the most significant achievements in US higher education during the latter half of the twentieth century was the increasing access enjoyed by historically marginalized populations, including women, people of color, and the poor and working class. With this achievement, however, has come a growing population of first generation students, including first-generation graduate students and faculty members, who struggle at times to navigate unfamiliar territory. This book offers insight into the challenges of first-generation status, as well as practical tools for navigating the halls of the academy for both academics and their institutional allies.
First-Generation College Students
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FIRST-GENERATION COLLEGE STUDENTS "...a concise, manageable, lucid summary of the best scholarship, practices, and future-oriented thinking about how to effectively recruit, educate, develop, retain, and ultimately graduate first-generation students." --from the foreword by JOHN N. GARDNER First-generation students are frequently marginalized on their campuses, treated with benign disregard, and placed at a competitive disadvantage because of their invisibility. While they include 51% of all undergraduates, or approximately 9.3 million students, they are less likely than their peers to earn degrees. Among students enrolled in two-year institutions, they are significantly less likely to persist into a second year. First-Generation College Students offers academic leaders and student affairs professionals a guide for understanding the special challenges and common barriers these students face and provides the necessary strategies for helping them transition through and graduate from their chosen institutions. Based in solid research, the authors describe best practices and include suggestions and techniques that can help leaders design and implement effective curricula, out-of-class learning experiences, and student support services, as well as develop strategic plans that address issues sure to arise in the future. The authors offer an analysis of first-generation student expectations for college life and academics and examine the powerful role cultural capital plays in shaping their experiences and socialization. Providing a template for other campuses, the book highlights programmatic initiatives at colleges around the county that effectively serve first-generation students and create a powerful learning environment for their success. First-Generation College Students provides a much-needed portrait of the cognitive, developmental, and social factors that affect the college-going experiences and retention rates of this growing population of college students.
The Invisibility Factor
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This collective volume fills an important gap in first-generation college student research by simultaneously achieving several important goals. Collectively, the essays represent a balance of personal narrative, qualitative, and quantitative approaches that extend our understanding of the first-generation college student (FGS) experience. The essays review the existing literature on FGS; outline the barriers to college success faced by FGS; update the existing literature by introducing new and cutting-edge first-generation research; and recommend solutions to those in the trenches, who include support staff who design programs to support FGS. The book's contributing authors bring important personal and scholarly expertise to the project. The authors include faculty, administrators, support services personnel, and former students at private liberal arts colleges, major research universities, community colleges, and comprehensive universities in urban and rural settings. The diverse perspectives represented in the essays will benefit administrators and staff working at diverse types of institutions with FGS. In addition, many of the authors were first-generation college students. Socio-economic background profoundly shapes a person's cultural transition into college and heavily determines what barriers to academic success he or she will face. This collection's authors have a keen understanding of the FGS experience having made the transition into a foreign academic culture themselves. The book's essays address the following topics of concern of staff who interact with FGS: - Understanding classism in the academy and class segregation on campus -Race, ethnicity, class, and immigration as they impact FGS' campus experiences -Insight for developing successful first-generation support service programs -FGS' emotional, academic, and cultural adjustment to campus life -The role of support groups in shaping the first-semester FGS college experience -The importance of mentoring in aiding FGS' cultural transition to college - The impact of a FGS' living situation (such as in a campus living-learning center) on academic and cultural transition
At the Intersection
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The experiences of first-generation college students are not monolithic. The nexus of identities matter, and this book is intended to challenge the reader to explore what it means to be a first-generation college student in higher education. Designed for use in classrooms and for use by the higher education practitioner on a college campus today, At the Intersectionswill be of value to the reader throughout their professional career. The book is divided into four parts with chapters of research and theory interspersed with thought pieces to provide personal stories to integrate the research and theory into lived experience. Each thought piece ends with questions to inspire readers to engage with the topic. Part One: Who is a First-generation College Student?provides the reader an entrée into the topic, with up-to-date data on both four-year and two-year colleges. Part One ends with a thought piece that asks the reader to pull together some of the big ideas before moving on to look more closely at students' identities. Part Two: The Intersection of Identityshares the research, experience and thoughts of authors in relation to the individual and overlapping identities of LGBT, low-income, white, African-American, Latinx, Native American, undocumented, female, and male students who are all also first-generation college students. Part Three: Programs and Practicesis an introduction to practices, policies and programs across the country. This section offers promise and direction for future work as institutions try to find a successful array of approaches to make the campus an inclusive place for the diverse population of first-generation college students.
Relationship-Rich Education
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A mentor, advisor, or even a friend? Making connections in college makes all the difference. What single factor makes for an excellent college education? As it turns out, it's pretty simple: human relationships. Decades of research demonstrate the transformative potential and the lasting legacies of a relationship-rich college experience. Critics suggest that to build connections with peers, faculty, staff, and other mentors is expensive and only an option at elite institutions where instructors have the luxury of time with students. But in this revelatory book brimming with the voices of students, faculty, and staff from across the country, Peter Felten and Leo M. Lambert argue that relationship-rich environments can and should exist for all students at all types of institutions. In Relationship-Rich Education, Felten and Lambert demonstrate that for relationships to be central in undergraduate education, colleges and universities do not require immense resources, privileged students, or specially qualified faculty and staff. All students learn best in an environment characterized by high expectation and high support, and all faculty and staff can learn to teach and work in ways that enable relationship-based education. Emphasizing the centrality of the classroom experience to fostering quality relationships, Felten and Lambert focus on students' influence in shaping the learning environment for their peers, as well as the key difference a single, well-timed conversation can make in a student's life. They also stress that relationship-rich education is particularly important for first-generation college students, who bring significant capacities to college but often face long-standing inequities and barriers to attaining their educational aspirations. Drawing on nearly 400 interviews with students, faculty, and staff at 29 higher education institutions across the country, Relationship-Rich Educationprovides readers with practical advice on how they can develop and sustain powerful relationship-based learning in their own contexts. Ultimately, the book is an invitation--and a challenge--for faculty, administrators, and student life staff to move relationships from the periphery to the center of undergraduate education.
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