students need to be designed to be maximally useful for this group of students. Specific strategies might involve the creation of non-threatening environments by employing already-successful first-generation students as peer mentors for new students

From the faculty's own point of view, they had clear standards, yet they also reported that students repeatedly expressed a desire that they be as explicit as possible. Even though faculty could recognize that their taken-for-granted expectations were not obvious to students, they tended to express this as part of a larger series of problems that they summarized as "not following directions." As one professor remarked: "I do have a few who write an excellent paper but it's not what they were assigned to write, and that's always difficult to grad

The interview questions covered three basic areas. First, we asked about the basic priorities that each group recognized, with regard to students' schoolwork. Next, we asked how students were supposed to know about these expectations. Finally, we asked about the kinds of problems that students encountered through not understanding expectations and how students should solve those problems

In contrast, students from a more traditional background enter the university with a level of cultural capital that makes it easier for them to become "role experts." Not only are they more familiar with higher education from listening to family members' academic histories, but they also are likely to have more appropriate approaches for dealing with teachers and other educational authorities because of parental coaching. In many ways, their parents have been preparing these traditional students for college ever since they first entered school. Traditional students' advantage in mastering the college student role is, thus, an example of how differences in cultural capital can perpetuate differences in family educational attainmen

. In addition, we examine whether different subgroups of students experience these issues in different ways by comparing how first-generation students' experiences with faculty expectations differ from more traditional students' experiences.

While my college had done an excellent job recruiting me, I had no road map for what I was supposed to do once I made it to campus

I might as well have been my non-English-speaking grandmother trying to read and understand them: The language felt that foreign. I called my mom at work and in tears told her that I had to come home, that I’d made a terrible mistake.

If students who attended a four-year college had parents with no education after high school, only 50 percent graduated within six years. If at least one parent had some college but no degree, the graduation rate was 57 percent. But if at least one parent had an associate degree or higher, the rate jumped to 72 percent.

Many education experts even use the terms “first gen” and “low income” interchangeably.

The school considered a student first generation only if neither parent had a bachelor’s degree.

ity University of New York system propelled almost six times as many low-income students into the middle class and beyond as all eight Ivy League campuses, plus Duke, M.I.T., Stanford and Chicago, combined.

These students entered college poor. They left on their way to the middle class and often the upper middle class.

The heyday of the colleges that serve America’s working class can often feel very long ago. It harks back to the mid-20th century, when City College of New York cost only a few hundred dollars a year and was known as the “Harvard of the proletariat.”

“A lot of medical approaches have ignored sleep,” said Ken Paller, a cognitive neuroscientist at Northwestern University. “People think about [poor sleep] as one of the complaints someone with depression or other disorders might have, rather than a critical part of the whole etiology of the disease, which is a new idea.”

lack of sleep is an escalating public health crisis that deserves as much attention as the obesity epidemic.

even a single night of sleep deprivation boosts brain levels of the proteins that form toxic clumps in Alzheimer’s patients.

In the screen-lit bustle of modern life, sleep is expendable. There are television shows to binge-watch, work emails to answer, homework to finish, social media posts to scroll through. We’ll catch up on shut-eye later, so the thinking goes — right after we click down one last digital rabbit hole.

Courage propels our willingness to be different and unique--to establish ourselves as a university with a distinct mission and character, rather than a follower in the pattern of others. Courage allows us to hold difficult conversations in broad forums and undergirds our commitment to social justice, to shared governance, to academic freedom and to student, faculty and staff activism.

From the heart of a diverse community, San Francisco State University honors roots, stimulates intellectual and personal development, promotes equity, and inspires the courage to lead, create, and innovate.  

converged

FSY

I came to accept during my freshman year that many of the gaps in my knowledge and understanding were simply limits of class and cultural background, not lack of aptitude or application as I’d feared