Supporting first-generation students is a priority that many institutions have identified but not many have mastered.
Former Columbia University senior admissions officer Jaye Fenderson said that, at Columbia, she realized not only how fortunate she herself had been in being able to attend Columbia, but that there is “an opportunity inequality at our top-tier institutions across this country” that means that “higher education demographics are not representative of our population.”
Fenderson left Columbia to pursue a career in film, with her most recent production, First Generation, focusing on this opportunity disparity at institutions around the country.
At a recent presidential roundtable hosted by the George Washington University Law School, Dean Blake Morant asked panelists a question: “How do we ensure that we are providing an opportunity, particularly to those [first-generation] students who may not traditionally have college in their sights, because I see this as an endemic part of the world that we are now living in?”
Rutgers University-Camden Chancellor Phoebe Haddon said for her, a fourth-generation college graduate, it was “striking” to her to find people who still ask if there’s value in higher education, but said that she was “quickly baptized” by some of the challenges facing first-generation students once she arrived at Camden.
“What I know now is that, if you come from a family where there has not been a high school diploma, you are only about 5 percent likely to be able to go on to college. And so we’ve got to intervene in that distressing number,” Haddon said.
It isn’t as easy as it might sound.
