Unseen disadvantage: How American universities' focus on independence undermines the academic performance of first-generation college students.

TLDR

American universities increasingly admit first‑generation college students, yet these students tend to struggle academically compared with continuing‑generation peers. The study proposes a cultural mismatch theory and tests the hypothesis that interdependent norms from working‑class backgrounds clash with universities’ independent norms, aiming to identify and address this source of the social‑class achievement gap. The authors surveyed university administrators to confirm a predominant focus on independence, conducted a longitudinal survey linking this mismatch to lower grades, and ran experiments at private and public institutions that manipulated cultural alignment to assess performance effects. Results show that an independence‑oriented culture makes academic tasks feel difficult and undermines first‑generation students’ performance, whereas an interdependence‑oriented culture reduces this difficulty and eliminates the performance gap without harming continuing‑generation students.

Abstract

American universities increasingly admit first-generation college students whose parents do not have 4-year degrees. Once admitted, these students tend to struggle academically, compared with continuing-generation students--students who have at least 1 parent with a 4-year degree. We propose a cultural mismatch theory that identifies 1 important source of this social class achievement gap. Four studies test the hypothesis that first-generation students underperform because interdependent norms from their mostly working-class backgrounds constitute a mismatch with middle-class independent norms prevalent in universities. First, assessing university cultural norms, surveys of university administrators revealed that American universities focus primarily on norms of independence. Second, identifying the hypothesized cultural mismatch, a longitudinal survey revealed that universities' focus on independence does not match first-generation students' relatively interdependent motives for attending college and that this cultural mismatch is associated with lower grades. Finally, 2 experiments at both private and public universities created a match or mismatch for first-generation students and examined the performance consequences. Together these studies revealed that representing the university culture in terms of independence (i.e., paving one's own paths) rendered academic tasks difficult and, thereby, undermined first-generation students' performance. Conversely, representing the university culture in terms of interdependence (i.e., being part of a community) reduced this sense of difficulty and eliminated the performance gap without adverse consequences for continuing-generation students. These studies address the urgent need to recognize cultural obstacles that contribute to the social class achievement gap and to develop interventions to address them.