First in the family

A definition first, because two different numbers circulate and they measure different things. Fifty four percent of American undergraduates have parents without a bachelor’s degree. Twenty six percent have parents with no postsecondary education at all. Both are real. They are not interchangeable, and anyone quoting one without saying which is being careless.

Where the gap actually appears

That third number is where I would focus, because paid internships are one of the strongest predictors of a first job. Students who held one averaged 1.61 job offers. Students with no internship averaged 0.77. Median starting salaries ran $62,500 against $42,500.

I should say plainly that those internship figures are observational. Students who land paid internships differ from those who do not in ways that also predict offers. The honest reading is that the internship pipeline is where advantage compounds, not that an internship single-handedly adds twenty thousand dollars to a salary.

The share varies enormously by institution. First-generation students are 41% of undergraduates at private nonprofit four-year colleges, 48% at public four-year institutions, and 64% at public two-year colleges. Where you study changes whether you are the exception or the majority.

The gap is smaller than the story, and later

Four years after finishing a bachelor’s degree, first-generation graduates report median earnings of $50,000 against $52,000 for their peers. That is a real difference and a modest one.

The larger differences are structural. Fifty five percent were in a job that required a bachelor’s degree, against 65%. Seventy nine percent could raise $2,000 for an unexpected need, against 87%. Nineteen percent had sat a graduate entrance exam, against 29%.

Read those together and a picture forms that has very little to do with talent. It is about buffer, information, and who told you that graduate school was a thing people like you do.

What I will not claim

You will see it said that first-generation students use career services less. I could not verify it, and the best available data points the other way: where use is broken out, Black and Hispanic graduates used career services more than white graduates and rated them more helpful.

I am flagging that because the reflex to explain the gap as a deficit in the student is strong, and it is often wrong. Sometimes the students are doing the work and the infrastructure is not returning it.

What actually helps

1. Treat the paid internship as the target, earlier than feels reasonable. It is the pipeline where the gap opens widest.
2. Ask the questions you were not handed. What does this job pay, who decides, what does the path look like in five years. Nobody thinks less of you for asking. Plenty of people assume you already know.
3. Build the informal relationships deliberately. They are the ones the evidence says actually help, and they are the ones not distributed evenly.
4. Use the tools that exist. The career explorer covers more than a thousand occupations, including what the work involves and what preparation it takes.

The prologue of Open Doors is called The Exposure Gap, and this is who it was written for. Not because anyone is behind on ability, but because some people were handed a map at the dinner table and some were not.