Colleges Get Financial Boost in Assisting First-Generation Students

Natalie Hershberger, Inbound coordinator and residence director at Juniata College, said grants helped “with the tracking of students and gave us some statistics to show the effectiveness of the program.”Juniata College already had started a program to track the academic progress of first-generation students before they received a Walmart grant through the Council of Independent Colleges. “When the grant came around, we used it to increase Pell-eligible, first-generation student participation,” said Natalie Hershberger, Inbound coordinator and residence director at Juniata College.

The program grew from 30 students to 350 students, or 90 percent of the students who are Pell-eligible at Juniata. “[The grant] helped us with the tracking of students and gave us some statistics to show the effectiveness of the program,” Hershberger said.

Juniata’s grant came from a partnership between Walmart Foundation and the Council of Independent Colleges. The Walmart Foundation awarded the Council of Independent Colleges two large grants targeted at improving educational outcomes for first-generation students. Higher education officials and professors convened in Baltimore this week to discuss best practices and results of the grants at the CIC/Walmart Foundation Symposium on First-Generation Students.

The grants, which ranged between $50,000 and $100,000, went to 50 CIC member institutions that had a proven commitment to recruiting and graduating first-generation students.

While 42.1 percent of students who enroll in college ― whose parents have degrees ― graduate in four years, only 27.4 of first-generation students do, according to the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California at Los Angeles. Yet, first-generation students who enroll in private institutions are more likely to graduate in a timely manner than those at public institutions, although they enroll in similar proportions at both.

Four years after the first grant period ended, and two years after the second grant period, Richard Ekman, CIC president, said that the net results were overwhelmingly positive. “My sense is that what we’ve done with these Walmart-funded projects is a beautiful demonstration of the power of these non-elite institutions to fuel upward mobility for lower-income, first generation students,” said Ekman.

In order to be the recipient of a grant, CIC-member institutions had to prove that they were committed to sustaining their individual programs to benefit first-generation students over the long term.