ABSTRACT
Current graduate students often respond with confusion when asked how their first-generation (first-gen) identity affects their experience as a graduate student. This is not surprising given that many of today’s grad students were enrolled in their undergraduate studies at a time when first-gen as an identity marker existed solely as a research term. Historically, the lack of clarity surrounding the first-gen college student label may have served to disguise the fact that first-gen students were being viewed through an educational deficit lens. Rendon et al. posit that educational deficit thinking suggests “cultural patterns of marginalized groups are essentially inferior and essentially predispose students within those groups to poor academic performance”. As institutional practices have shifted away from deficit-thinking models, more of today’s first-gen undergraduates have embraced the first-gen identity in ways that fit their needs.
