Beyond a Deficit View: Understanding the Experiences of First-Generation Students Who Participate in College Access and Success Community-Based Organizations.

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

While the topic of first-generation college students has received much attention in education, research, practice, and policy, the term first-generation represents persistent configurations of inequality. The dominant and problematic manner in which first-generation status has been negatively operationalized in research sees first-generation students as a liability, than an asset. Existing research on first-generation students is deficit-based and uses terms like disadvantaged, low-achieving, vulnerable, and at-risk to describe first-generation students. These labels are not particularly helpful in understanding the needs of first-generation students, but simply offer a dominant narrative that promotes misunderstanding and limits the capacity of practitioners, researchers, and policymakers to effectively grasp how students` backgrounds and identities shape their decisions and relationships to others. Despite substantial understanding of the issues related to postsecondary access and success for first-generation students, there is limited understanding of the resources that support first-generation students’ college access, persistence, and college completion collectively. Fortunately, college access and success community-based organizations (CBO) seek to close this gap, while also offering counter-narratives on the reconstruction of first-generation identity to symbolize empowerment, community, and resilience. However, limited research exists on the persistence of first-generation students who have participated in a CBO, and enrolled and graduated from college as a direct result of participating in the organization. The purpose of this qualitative, interpretive phenomenological analysis (IPA) study aimed to deeply understand how first-generation college graduates of 4-year universities make sense of and attach meaning to their participation in a college access and success CBO and how it contributed to their college completion. Four college access and success community-based organizations granted the researcher access to their sites and students for the purposes of this study. Six first-generation college graduates were identified through criterion sampling and interviewed. The findings show the development of social and cultural capital, supportive and dedicated CBO staff, and the cultivation of a resilient and strength-based mindset were identified as the primary factors that participants believed positively influenced their postsecondary success, thus rejecting deficit-based and peril portrayals of first-generation status. Practical recommendations for K-12 Schools, Higher Education Institutions, and Community-Based Organizations are discussed.