Conclusion

Chapter 8 recaps the primary takeaways and discusses their implications for selective campuses. While campuses and scholarly literature generally treat first-generation students as a cohesive whole, this book speaks to a much more complicated process whereby students’ intersectional identities and preferences work along with institutional structures to sort first-generation students into one of several campus geographies that then lead to different types of connections with faculty, peers, extracurricular activities, and social engagements. Campus geographies are important because they provide informal social knowledge, tools, resources, and inclinations that may be more or less helpful both in college and as they prepare for post-college life. The authors close by discussing the implications of this research for selective colleges wishing to support a range of first-generation students more successfully.