Understanding first-generation undergraduate engineering students’ entry and persistence through social capital theory

Abstract Background The higher education literature is replete with deficit-based studies of first-generation college students. By thinking of students’ social relationships as embedded assets, our research adds to an anti-deficit, or asset-based, framing of first-generation students majoring in engineering. Our multi-institution study qualitatively characterizes how the various people (alters) in students’ social networks provide expressive and instrumental social capital that helps students decide to enter and then to persist in undergraduate engineering majors. Our work compares and contrasts social capital assets described by first-generation college students and those described by continuing-generation college students. Results Both first-generation college students and continuing-generation college students described how they leveraged the social capital inherent in their social relationships. In our comparison of the two groups, we found far more similarities than differences in the way participants described their social capital. For example, the network compositions (the specific alters providing resources) were similar for both groups. Both groups reported how parents, family members, peers, middle and high school teachers, individuals associated with science, technology, engineering, and mathematics programs, university professors, academic advisors and other personnel, employers and coworkers, professional organization contacts, and graduate students provided social capital related to major choice and persistence. One difference between the two groups relates to the type of social capital provided by parents and intergenerational family members. First-generation college students described their familial relationships as assets that provided robust emotional support (expressive social capital) while the students decided upon a college major and vigorous encouragement to persist once the students enrolled in undergraduate studies. Continuing-generation college students described their families as providing engineering-specific instrumental actions and information during their selection of a college major, and then familial support changing to that of an expressive nature while the students were enrolled in engineering studies. Conclusions Our findings illustrate that engineering undergraduates’ social relationships and networks are critical to their success in engineering. The relational assets first-generation college students possess support an anti-deficit framing of this group. Our work helps us understand specifically how students gain support from a variety of alters, and it provides implications for how to better support all students’ engineering educational pathways.