'First in family' as a measure of disadvantage in higher education

In higher education policy circles, it is an article of faith that students who are the first in their family (usually in the sense that neither their parents, nor any older siblings, has already studied at university) appear to be at higher risk of being unsuccessful in university education. The rationale links to Bourdieu's concept of social capital - students being able to tap into who they know (their family) and importantly what their family knows (about university study) matters. Family members with past university experience can help with university-specific knowledge - things like how to choose majors, manage workload, seek extensions, interpret feedback, and navigate various university systems and processes. This all makes the challenges of studying at university a little easier.

So, I was surprised to learn from this 2020 article by Anna Adamecz-Völgyi, Morag Henderson, and Nikki Shure (all University College London), published in the journal Economics of Education Review (ungated earlier version here), that there is actually limited empirical evidence supporting first-in-family as an indicator of disadvantage. It is that empirical gap that Adamecz-Völgyi et al. attempt to fill, but the interesting thing about this paper is not so much that they find support for first-in-family as a measure of disadvantage, but the mechanism through which it works.

Adamecz-Völgyi et al.  use data from 7707 students from the Next Steps (formerly the Longitudinal Study of Young People in England, LSYPE), which followed a cohort of young people born in 1989/1990. The 'age 25' wave of that study captures most of the cohort after they have completed university education. Adamecz-Völgyi et al. look at various measures of disadvantage, and how well they predict students participating in, or graduating from, higher education. Aside from first-in-family, their battery of disadvantage measures (which they refer to as Widening Participation (WP) measures) includes whether the student had special education needs at high school, whether they were eligible for free school meals, whether their parents were of low social class (based on occupation), whether their family was part of the 20 percent most deprived families (based on a measure of deprivation), whether they had care responsibilities while at high school, whether they were non-white ethnicity, whether they have a disability, whether they lived in a single-parent household, whether they had ever been in care, and whether they lived in an area of high socioeconomic deprivation.

Adamecz-Völgyi et al. use a few different methods to establish whether first-in-family (which they refer to as 'potential FiF', because they only have data on parental education, and not the education of older siblings) is a good predictor of disadvantage (in terms of participating in, or completing) in higher education, including: (1) comparing the predictive power of each variable in separate models (compared using the 'Area under the Receiver Operating Characteristic' curve (AUC)); (2) looking at whether adding first-in-family to a model that already includes a parsimonious set of other measures of disadvantage improves predictions; and (3) using a 'random forest' model to rank the predictors in terms of importance. The AUC is a measure of how often the model correctly predicts a binary variable (in this case, whether a student enrols/does not enrol in university, or whether they do/do not complete university). The random forest model identifies which variables are the most important by running many regressions with different selections of variables. In their analyses, Adamecz-Völgyi et al. find that:

When we compare potential FiF to other WP indicators, it emerges as the most important measure until we condition on prior attainment and all measures end up similarly predictive. We provide evidence that the effects of family background manifest in educational attainment at an early age and pre-university educational attainment is the most important channel of the effect of parental education on HE participation and graduation.

So, this research supports the common belief that first-in-family is a good measure of disadvantage. Moreover, it shows that first-in-family picks up some dimension of disadvantage that other common measures do not. However, the mechanism through which first-in-family affects higher education participation and success is almost entirely through the students' success in pre-university education. Students who are first-in-family at university tend to have worse performance in high school, and that largely accounts for their lower performance in university. Adamecz-Völgyi et al. conclude that:

...being potential FiF (and having social and economic disadvantages in general) matters all along the production function of a child's human capital from early childhood to university. Thus, the educational achievement measures that a university can use are contaminated by this pre-existing disadvantage carried along since early childhood (or probably, since birth). They do not reflect the child's true capacity, but rather the interaction of their innate abilities and family circumstances. Thus, WP measures that simply favour the disadvantaged student out of two students having the same level of pre-university attainment are not enough to widen participation: on average, those from disadvantaged backgrounds are not going have the same pre-university educational attainment levels than those from advantaged backgrounds. The attainment gap must be addressed explicitly by CA [Contextual Admissions] measures.

Instead, I see two ways that universities may respond to these results. Conditional on pre-university educational attainment, first-in-family students do not have worse higher education outcomes than other similarly-prepared students. The reason first-in-family students do less well on average is that they tend to enter university with lower prior educational attainment, and it’s that pre-university gap that accounts for most of the observed difference. On one hand, as Adamecz-Völgyi et al. argue, first-in-family is an indicator of disadvantage, and from a social justice perspective universities should try to mitigate sources of disadvantage whenever they are apparent. On the other hand, these results could be read as suggesting that universities shouldn't worry about first-in-family students, because they perform as well as otherwise similarly-prepared students. The problem is the lack of pre-university educational attainment, and that needs to be addressed in pre-university education, not at university. University-level support may help at the margin, but it risks being an ambulance at the bottom of the cliff. Moreover, two otherwise similar students in terms of pre-university educational attainment could be treated very differently under targeted support policies (such as Contextual Admissions) when one is first-in-family and the other is not, raising issues of fairness.

I'm not going to take a stand on which of those two perspectives (social justice or fairness) is more important. They both have merit. If you accept first-in-family as a measure of disadvantage, the actionable question is whether universities can cost-effectively close preparedness gaps after entry, or whether they should rely on advocating for changes in pre-university education. At least, this research can provide us with confidence that first-in-family is indeed a suitable measure of disadvantage in higher education.