When I unpack my duffle bag and register for courses in September, 2023, I’ll join a demographic swell of enrolled college students who grew up in first-generation American households. According to the Migration Policy Institute, of the 19 million students studying at U.S. colleges and universities, some 28 percent are immigrants or the children of immigrants. 

Like me, many of them were raised by parents who never attended college in any country. As a freshman, I’ll share dorms, discuss novels, and solve problem sets alongside them and non-immigrant first-gens–all of us carried forward by the wave of social mobility that higher education promises.  

While I benefited from a fully supportive family and a school that offers excellent college advising, many first-gens have to go it alone, managing jobs, FAFSA forms, deadline spreadsheets, amped up competition, and a bewildering landscape of choice in a country with some 5,300 colleges and universities.

A 2021 data analysis from the Federal Reserve Board, reported by the Pew Research Foundation, confirms that first gens face a dramatic access and achievement gap compared to the children of college-educated parents. This unequal footing persists during and after college, taking a bite out of relative lifetime income and wealth along with the deeper social, emotional, and cultural benefits of higher education.   

In the US, about 70% of adults ages 22 to 59 with at least one parent who earned a BA or higher earn their own BAs, compared to just 26% of first-gen peers. The attainment gap results not only from income, citizenship status, and linguistic disparities, but also from less quantifiable factors, such as access to  “college knowledge” –  familiarity with the application process, Common App essays, college subjects and majors, and the non-academic components of collegiate culture, such as dorms, dining halls, Greek systems, service trips, and student-led clubs. The parents of first-gen students like me may model a strong work ethic, intelligence, curiosity, and the humane values that shaped us, but they cannot be expected to guide us through a process they have never experienced. 

As I embarked on my own college search, I sought alternative sources for this insight, including expertise offered by first-gen educators. This is the first in a series of interviews I conducted with them. I hope that this project, “We’re Here,” will further a growing knowledge-sharing network and help, in a small way, to narrow the education and career gap for first generation students.  

Naomi Arroyo is a co-founder and Chief Marketing officer of Florio Labs, a justice-informed tech incubator in NYC, but when she was growing up in the Bronx, she never envisioned a tech-industry career. Like many first-gen students, she had access to technology but had not yet identified ways to connect her own tech skills to career pathways. Her current role is informed by her background in education and organizational leadership. 

She was a teacher and reading specialist before starting a STEAM program incorporating science, technology, engineering, arts, and math in public school classrooms. She took her education career “more into the tech space because I got really interested in the issue of the accessibility of assistive tech and technology integration in schools.” Her own career “kind of pivoted in that space” as she became “very interested in entrepreneurship” and met her Floreo co-founders. 

They all hoped to impact the spaces they were working in, “increasing access to creative technology and education and making that something that everybody could relate to and see themselves in.” They realized that by collaborating, they could “take that kind of impact and really broaden it.” 

Ms. Arroyo’s childhood interest in computers opened her awareness to technology and how much she enjoyed it, but it was not until later that she recognized this engagement as part of the broader tech industry. The video games she enjoyed, and messaging friends on AOL, she later came to understand, planted the early seeds of her professional identity. “When I was able to start gaming … that was my first introduction to technology and I was always really interested in that.”

She has since found ways to intersect her social justice concerns with her affinity for tech. Switching from public school to a private prep school for high school, she was struck by the resource discrepancies she witnessed and how she was left to navigate unfamiliar terrain on her own. 

As an advocate for young women, she now works against social pressures and keeping up relationships with friends and boyfriends. These burdens can feel extra heavy for first-gen students like Ms. Arroyo who may lack sufficient cultural support from guidance counselors, and the stress often intensifies during the college process. She poignantly relates the feeling of weight and pressure like a “backpack full of rocks… because you still got to write your essays, you still have to go to Calculus class, do your AP portfolios.” In addition to this,  she was often told: “don’t apply here… you're not going to get in here.” 

Ms. Arroyo says she was motivated by her parents and the value they placed on education.  

“It's that typical immigrant experience – they had not experienced it, but still saw value in it. So they kind of instill that in us.” Her parents met in Spanish Harlem - her mother having come from Puerto Rico and her father from Patterson, New Jersey. While they both had high School diplomas, they weren’t familiar with the college application process and all of the associated research, essay writing, and campus visits it can entail. Her parents had no context or personal experience to draw from: “It was very much an experience of paving the way. That was my intro into that first-gen experience.” 

As a trailblazer in her family, Ms. Arroyo built the road without a map or guide-posts. She relates this to “going into a dark cave, and you have to find the path yourself and it could be scary at times.” As an ed-tech innovator, now she brings her personal experiences and deep understanding of the first-gen high school and college experience to her relationships with students. She understands how discouraging, lonely, and overwhelming the college process can be. Students have “too much on their plate,” even without the  psychological fallout from the pandemic and its disproportionate impact on first-gen families. She views educational advocacy for first-generation students as an urgent public challenge: “How do we as a society support people who are experiencing our institutions for the first time?”