First-generation collegians lag behind.

First-generation college students may have fewer academic skills than their peers whose parents went to college. Ernest Pascarella, professor of education, University of Illinois at Chicago, indicates that researchers followed nearly 3,000 students through the first year of college. First-generation students often were less skilled than their peers in reading, math, and critical thinking at the beginning of their college careers and showed less improvement in those skills than their classmates during their first year.

"As higher education becomes more accessible to minorities and students from low-income families, we will be seeing a dramatic increase in first-generation students in the next decade," Pascarella predicts. "This study's most important message is that first-generation students need more support than other students, and that we need high school and college programs to do that."

First-generation college-goers are more likely than other students to have non-academic obligations such as children and work that may influence their study habits; tend to take fewer credit hours and study less, causing a lag in cognitive...