Pathways and Experiences of First-Generation Graduate Students / Progress in Mathematics (PDF)

"A thoughtful analysis by a scholar who not only knows the literature inside and out, but also by a practitioner with intimate knowledge of the challenges students face. Compelling. Insightful. Practical."

-William G. Tierney, University Professor Emeritus and Founding Director, Pullias Center for Higher Education, University of Southern California, USA

"This is an important read for anyone who works in graduate programs or cares about graduate/professional students."

-Jeffrey F. Milem, Jules Zimmer Dean and Professor, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA

"This text is a call to action for interrogating postsecondary contexts to meet the needs of a frequently overlooked population in graduate education."

-Eboni M. Zamani-Gallaher, Professor and Associate Dean, University of Pittsburgh, USA and Executive Director, Council for the Study of Community Colleges

This book focuses on first-generation graduatestudents in the US and the graduate or post-baccalaureate programs that house and educate these students. The voices in this book, including first-generation graduate students, address the phenomena of graduate students' experiences and related university practices, with the practices connected to traditional academic and Western values and to academic and neoliberal institutional logics. First-generation graduate students' testimonies serve as the foundation of the analysis of students' pathways to graduate school and their experiences within graduate school. The conditions for first-generation graduate students in their programs require remedies that will facilitate student well-being, peer community attachment, and persistence, and will educate and train students for achievement in graduate school and for employment after graduate school.