I attended a very small high school where only a very small percentage of students went on to higher education after high school. Only general education courses were taught. There was little-to-none college preparatory courses. The culture of my high school was not a feeder school to higher education (McDonough 1994). The main focus of my high school was sports and retaining students to graduate high school. The only movement toward helping students attend college was that we did take the ACT test, but there was no preparatory training involved, We just simply went and took it one day. As I was growing up, college and higher education in general was not important. The idea of attending college after graduating high school was a completely
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I am not exactly sure why I wanted to attend college. I think because I knew that I needed to break the cycle, and I felt that there was more to life than what was being presented. It was only up to me to change it. All of my family basically laughed at me and told me that college was only for rich people. They also advised me that I needed to give up and worry about finding a real job. They said let the fancy, rich people deal with college. After I moved out of my mother’s house, I decided to attend college, and it was mainly because everyone said that I was not going to make …show more content…
There have been many forms of research on first-generation college students. This is a growing area of research but can be very difficult due to defining actually what is a firs- generation college student (Renn 2013). First generation college students are difficult to define and difficult to count, but they remain a large and important segment of the undergraduate college student population. The most common and accepted definition of a first-generation college student is when neither parent possesses a four-year degree (Davis, 2010). Research shows that most first-generation college students start off at two-year community colleges and are much less likely to engage in extra activities on college campuses (Pacarella
I am not exactly sure why I wanted to attend college. I think because I knew that I needed to break the cycle, and I felt that there was more to life than what was being presented. It was only up to me to change it. All of my family basically laughed at me and told me that college was only for rich people. They also advised me that I needed to give up and worry about finding a real job. They said let the fancy, rich people deal with college. After I moved out of my mother’s house, I decided to attend college, and it was mainly because everyone said that I was not going to make …show more content…
There have been many forms of research on first-generation college students. This is a growing area of research but can be very difficult due to defining actually what is a firs- generation college student (Renn 2013). First generation college students are difficult to define and difficult to count, but they remain a large and important segment of the undergraduate college student population. The most common and accepted definition of a first-generation college student is when neither parent possesses a four-year degree (Davis, 2010). Research shows that most first-generation college students start off at two-year community colleges and are much less likely to engage in extra activities on college campuses (Pacarella