Fernando Mejia was just happy to graduate high school.
Unlike his peers who had taken the SAT and applied to colleges, Mejia, a recent immigrant from Mexico, was still struggling with his English.
He said it was not until the end of high school when a guidance counselor reviewed his work and said he had the potential to succeed in higher education that he began to see opportunities for the future at a community college and later a four-year university.
“I wasn’t ready. I didn’t have the skills to think critically, to write and speak well,” Mejia, a third-year art history student, said.
But as a first-generation college student, Mejia represents a decreasing demographic in college admissions.
According to a new survey study released by the Cooperative Institutional Research Program at UCLA about incoming college freshman based on data collected between 1971 and 2005, there was a decrease in the overall number of first-generation college students in that period.
When surveys used to gather information from hundreds of universities were first distributed in 1971, 38.5 percent of respondents were the first members of their families to attend college. Over the years, that percentage steadily declined and in 2005, only 15.9 percent reported being first-generation college students.
Victor Saenz, a visiting professor at the UCLA Graduate School of Education & Information Studies, said he believes the sharp decline is due to a greater number of Americans attending college.
“There are more people going to some form of college and it’s no accident ““ our federal and state government have been actively working to increase access to higher education,” he said.
With more Americans enrolling in college, fewer students are coming from families with no exposure to higher education.
“Every family has had a first-generation (student) at one time or another. Somebody had to be the first person to go to college,” Saenz said.
The study examines which ethnicities are showing the most significant declines in first-generation students, as well as their motivations to enroll in universities.
Black students show the steepest decline in first-generation students, from 62.9 percent in 1971 to 22.6 percent in 2005.
But Saenz said the declining percentage of first-generation black college students may not indicate an increase in college enrollment within the black community.
“We have to do more research but we suspect the reason you see the black rate go down so quickly is that those that are going to college are disproportionately from families whose parents also went to college,” he said.
Latino students show the slowest rate of decline of any of the ethnicities examined in the report.
Alfred Herrera, assistant vice provost for academic partnerships in the UCLA Division of Undergraduate Education, said he believes the slow decline of first-generation college students in the Latino community may be due to changes within the Latino population.
“For African Americans, it’s a stable population. There aren’t new groups coming into the county, whereas with Latinos and some Asian groups, many groups are coming (to the United States) that aren’t educated in the U.S. or sometimes in their own countries,” he said.
Mejia said his parents had little education in Mexico, so they were unable to teach him the important skills, such as study habits and critical thinking, needed to prepare him for high school and college.
But the findings of the study show that most first-generation students are significantly motivated by their parents to pursue college, Saenz said.
Saenz said he believes there has been a common misconception that parents without a college education are detriments to their children because they offer little information about the college process. But the study shows that family is one of the most important factors in motivating students to come to college.
“Having been in this country for a while, these families are understanding and (are) handing down to their children the ideas of self-betterment and upward social mobility,” he said.
For Mejia, though, motivation came from outside the family.
“I didn’t (feel) motivated before. I didn’t think I could succeed. I thought it was too far of a reach for me, but my motivation to go was this counselor who said, “˜You can do it. I think you can succeed in college,'” he said.