University of Minnesota advisers need more first-gen focus, students say
The University of Minnesota’s first-generation student population feels mostly supported by their advisers, but those students want their advisers to help navigate their university experience.
Bavi Weston, associate director of advising of CLA, in her advising office in Minneapolis, Minn. in Johnston Hall on Tuesday, April 16, 2024. According to Weston, advising staff turnover has been a significant challenge for CLA (AccessU/Gabriel Castilho).
When first-generation students come to the University of Minnesota, their biggest challenges are often having to ask the most fundamental questions: How do I send an email? Do I need a laptop? Is this question too dumb to ask?
Such questions reflect what first-generation students often do not know about the so-called “hidden curriculum” — implicit social or cultural expectations that can influence student success.
Academic advisers are often best positioned to help first-generation students navigate the hidden curriculum, especially if those advisers understand that students may lack information most students usually know.
Yet at the University of Minnesota, where advising is housed in separate colleges and departments, the needs of first-generation students may not always be a priority — despite the major gains advising has made during the past decade to serve first-generation students.
Some colleges and programs offer approaches that focus intensely on the needs of first-generation students. Other colleges train their advisers on how to take time, build relationships and address the hidden curriculum for first-generation students, but advisers also face a demanding workload to cover many student needs.
As a result, the advising experience for first-generation students can sometimes come down to the personality and motivation of an individual adviser.
“The advising group as a whole has made considerable commitments to first-gen students over the last decade,” Rashné Jehangir, a professor of higher education in the College of Education and Human Development, said in an email to AccessU. Through the annual Tate Conference, advisers have come to see first-generation students as assets, not burdens, and increasingly understood the equity issues involved, she said.
“This is not to say that all is perfect — there is always room for ongoing development,” Jehangir said in the email. “Their work is also shaped (and sometimes constrained) by the culture, climate and power (e.g. faculty, dept. etc) in their particular program or college.”
Somewhat supported, yet still needing more
Many first-generation students say they feel at least somewhat supported by their academic advisers. According to an AccessU survey in March, one-third of first-generation respondents said they felt “very supported” by academic advising and 58% said they felt “somewhat supported.” Only 9% indicated they felt unsupported.
“My academic advising has been really, really good,” said Claire Pitrof, a third-year microbiology major. “My only qualm with the academic advising is it is so, so hard to get in to see the advisers in CBS [College of Biological Sciences]. There’s such limited time that they’re available.”
Other multiple first-generation survey respondents, who offered opinions in the survey and in follow-up interviews, expressed a similarly mixed picture about their advisers. While some said they were satisfied, others advisers made rude comments, gave misleading information or provided insufficient guidance on the hidden curriculum. Some worried about being perceived as overbearing by advisers if they visited too often.
“I wish the UMN gave every first-generation student an adviser that would walk us through everything; like signing up for classes, who to contact for certain questions, financial aid questions, etc,” said a student in an anonymous survey response. “It was very overwhelming having to contact so many different people and emails for different things I had questions about. I always felt like a burden to my academic advisers, which is why it would be helpful to have specific advisers that help first-generation students navigate things.”
Feeling comfortable with frequent visits — in other words, developing a relationship — is what first-generation advocates say those students need from an adviser.
For years, Jehangir has urged a better way to advise first-generation students. In 2017, she founded the First-Gen Institute, which runs workshops that teach advisers and professors about the hidden expectations and assumptions behind the curriculum, which first-generation students might not know.
Identity matters when advising first-generation students
Empathy, listening, and an open door helps. But in the end, reflecting their identities makes a big difference.
When it comes to feeling supported, first-generation students say they have a better connection with advisers who share similar experiences and identities to their own.
First-gen students make up a quarter of the University of Minnesota’s undergraduate population with 65% of first-gen students being people of color.
To help first-generation students get access to advisers who reflect their identity, the university has programs with advisers who can give those students special attention.
The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Program, also known as the MLK program, is an opt-in program designed to serve students who identify as people of color with a specialized academic advising community and a social justice education community. Of the 1,126 students enrolled in the MLK program, 44% are first-generation students.
Angie Hurtado Rivera, a second-year student, said her MLK advisers have always been women of color or first-generation with immigrant families.
“It’s been a great opportunity to see people like myself through that,” Hurtado Rivera said. “That was definitely a very strong community-building part of it for me, and to come from your adviser, I think that was really impactful.”
The President’s Emerging Scholars Program, or PES, is another initiative aimed at helping students who have “overcome social, economic, or physical barriers to educational achievement,” with preference given to first-generation students, according to their website. PES supports 969 students in total and about 76% of those students are first-generation.
Ah Vang-Lo, a TRIO Student Support Services, President’s Emerging Scholars adviser and a first-generation alumna of the university, said having more Asian staff and faculty would have improved her experience as a first-generation student.
“Staff and faculty that look like us super matters,” she said. “This whole Representation Matters movement hits home so hard. When you can see yourself able to be successful as a future professor who looks like you, that connection is a whole world in itself.”
Her expertise comes from working as an adviser with the university’s General College, founded in 1934 and closed in 2006. The college accepted promising students, many of them first-generation, who did not meet admission requirements and offered a pathway to a four-year degree after two years.
“They used to call us counselor advocates,” Jehangir said. “I loved that title because it was both. It was expected that you were a counselor but also an advocate.”
In a study conducted in 2018 with CEHD associate professor Michael Stebleton, Jehangir found that first-generation students of color benefit significantly from an adviser or faculty member who pays attention to their progress.
“If they had that one faculty person or that one adviser who was really like, ‘I’m gonna show you the way,’ they would make sure they succeeded,” Jehangir said. “But if there was somebody who viewed that notion of help as hand-holding or spoon-feeding, then it was much harder for them to succeed.”
Daniel Morales, interim director of classroom climate at the Multicultural Center for Academic Excellence, known as MCAE, agreed that first-generation students need more frequent and regular meetings with advisers to make sure they are getting information that other students might already know.
“They [advisers] have to meet with them regularly throughout their educational journey,” Morales said. “Academic advisers should be able to help students if they don’t know what a grant is, need a loan or need to figure out how to navigate the One Stop services.”
Kirsten Collins, a CEHD adviser who was a first-generation student, is known for building strong relationships with students.
“The more times you meet with someone, the more they start to realize, ‘Oh, I can ask this person a question, even if I don’t totally know what the question is,’ or ‘I don’t know if they’re the right person to ask. This is my kind of one-stop person that can help me,” Collins said.
Advisers of first-generation students also need to have qualities of empathy, congruence and unconditional positive regard, said Alexander Hines, the director of the President’s Emerging Scholars, Martin Luther King Jr. and Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion programs.
“I can’t put myself in your shoes, but you should be able to understand if I’m coming from a certain condition of mental well-being, disenfranchised and marginalized population no matter what your race is,” Hines said.
Hines said he thinks some advisers give their students only one chance to prove themselves, but he does not believe in that mindset.
“What’s the old saying? First impressions are the last impressions, you never get a second chance,” Hines said. “I believe students deserve second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh chances if needed. But sometimes policies get in the way or practices get in the way of how we’re retaining the students.”
Colleges vary in their advising
Even though Jehangir and the First Gen Institute have the research to show what first-generation students need from advising, the university does not provide this training across all colleges.
The university is trying to offer support through several initiatives, including TRIO, First-Gen Week programming and the President’s Emerging Scholars Program, also known as PES. All these programs offer targeted academic and social support to first-generation students.
This semester, the university announced the creation of a First-Gen Student Center, set to open in the fall. The gathering space in Appleby Hall will offer first-gen-specific programming and advising.
The center and its three full-time staff members will aim to support first-generation students in whatever way possible, said LeeAnn Melin, associate vice provost for student success in the Office of Undergraduate Education, who is one of the lead administrators for the center.
But these programs will not directly affect the individual college advising processes.
Parker Smith, an adviser in the College of Biological Sciences, said a lot of resources are available on how to advise first-gen students.
“But it’s sort of up to advisers to seek out that specific training,” Smith said “There might be set-out things and other units because each college trains advisers a little bit differently. But there isn’t a university-wide first-gen training.”
As a result, first-generation students can have different advising experiences depending on the college they are in and which college adviser they see.
Ah Vang-Lo, a TRIO Student Support Services and PES adviser, and a first-generation alumna of the university, said this often results in poor guidance around the hidden curriculum.
“The advising community needs to do a better job of naming the hidden curriculum,” Vang-Lo said. “When you come to campus, nowhere does it say, ‘You have to have a laptop.’ But nowadays, it’s assumed that you need to have a laptop to be successful anywhere.”
Vang-Lo said certain computer programs required for classes, which may not always be free through the university, can also be a barrier for low-income students.
At the College of Education and Human Development, first-generation students receive a high level of advising attention, said Ellen Sunshine, associate director of student recruitment, admissions and engagement. CEHD’s advisers are generally more diverse than other colleges, and building relationships with students over time is critical for advisers, Sunshine said.
“About half of the advisers … in my unit are first-generation themselves,” Sunshine said. “Many of them also come from traditionally marginalized communities. So students are showing up into spaces where they’re mainly seeing themselves reflected.”
Colleges at the university have varying ways of assigning students to advisers, not all of which take into account first-generation status.
Steve Yang, assistant dean for student services at the College of Design, said his college aims to keep its student-to-adviser ratio to no more than 300-to-1 but does not designate any of its six advisers for first-generation students.
“Our advisers are trained to support students from all backgrounds and identities,” Yang said.
Amy Gunter, director of academic advising for the College of Science and Engineering, tries to direct most of the college’s PES students — a program that has a majority of first-generation students — to one adviser.
Ellen Sunshine, associate director of student recruitment, admissions and engagement of CEHD, in her advising office in Minneapolis, Minn. in the Education Sciences Building on Wednesday, April 24, 2024 (AccessU/Gabriel Castilho).
“That adviser also helps teach one of the sections of our first-year course that’s designed for our PES cohort,” Gunter said.
The College of Liberal Arts assigns advisers by who is available. The college’s 60 advisers serve an average of 200 students each and spend a year in a mentored training process to learn about university resources, including those used by first-generation students, said Bavi Weston, associate director of CLA’s advising.
Weston said CLA’s biggest challenge with advising in the college has been staff turnover. Even though some professionals have been working in the department for over 20 years, the newer advisers are spending less time in their positions. If best practices for first-generation advising involve developing relationships, that becomes challenging, she said.
“Over time, we’re going to have to really think about what that looks like for advising,” Weston said. “If our idea is, ‘We want to develop relationships, but I’m not staying through your whole time here,’ then that kind of shifts what that looks like.”
A first-generation advising model
At the University of Michigan, Terra Molengraff is the program director of first-generation initiatives and a first-generation student herself — someone who learned as a graduate student under Jehangir. Molengraff said she makes sure that the first-generation initiatives taking place at the university have a cohesive vision and are points of contact for first-gen students on campus.
“We have this kind of overarching view of first-gen,” Molengraff said. “Because we have so many resources, we don’t need to recreate any programs, we just need to use what we have.”
Molengraff said her approach has allowed her to hold training sessions with advisers across campus.
“Building relationships with advisers and anyone who provides training for advisers is a part of my role that is very important to this campus-wide model,” Molengraff said. “It can’t just be a one-and-done approach. It must include regular training that is updated every year while also advocating for advisers to have more time to build relationships with students
The University of Michigan, with about 14% of its student population being first-generation, is designated as a “First-Gen Forward” institution by the Center for First-Generation Student Success, a national organization. To gain this designation, Institutions must complete requirements that include holding a first-generation college celebration event, attending a First Scholars interest meeting and meeting “annual programming requirements with milestones.”
About 25% of students at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities are first-generation, and the institution does not have that designation. But the College of Education and Human Development does.
For Jehangir, excellence at the university can coexist with a system that provides access to support for students who need it. Advising can reflect this.
“I think there’s this notion that access and excellence cannot exist simultaneously,” Jehangir said. The view of “if you’re going to have access, then you’re going to spoon-feed; and if you’re going to have excellence, then there’s a rigor” — that, she argued, is a myth.
“I would argue that they can be really intimately tied together,” Jehangir said.
This story was reported and written collaboratively for AccessU: First Gen on Campus by Fiona Curran, Gabriel Castilho, Hadeal Rizeq, Ariana Valentin and Ben Wagner.