Navigating Social Class Mobility in Higher Education: Literature Review Early Draft

The following is an early draft review for EDD 852: Dissertation Inquiry I, part of my EdD in Educational Leadership for Social Justice at the University of Hartford. The working title of my dissertation is Navigating Social Class Mobility in Higher Education: A Qualitative Study of Identity Development Among Low-Income, First-Generation College Graduates.

Introduction

This literature review examines the intersection of first-generation college status, low-income background, social class mobility, and identity development. Much of the higher education literature has historically approached first-generation and low-income students through an access-and-completion lens, asking whether students enter college, persist, and earn credentials. That lens remains important, but it is incomplete for a study focused on graduates. Graduation may mark institutional success, but it does not necessarily resolve the social, emotional, cultural, or economic consequences of crossing class lines through higher education. The literature suggests that social class mobility can reshape how students and graduates understand family, belonging, social capital, cultural fit, achievement, and the self (Friedman, 2016; Ives & Castillo-Montoya, 2020; Jury et al., 2017; Phillips et al., 2020).

This review therefore treats low-income, first-generation graduates not simply as college completers, but as people whose educational trajectories may require movement across different social worlds. These worlds often operate with different rules, resources, expectations, and forms of legitimacy. Bourdieu’s (1986) theory of capital provides a useful foundation for understanding how economic, social, and cultural capital are unevenly distributed and rewarded within higher education. At the same time, Yosso’s (2005) community cultural wealth framework is necessary because it challenges deficit-based interpretations of students from low-income and marginalized backgrounds. In combination, these frameworks make it possible to hold two truths at once: low-income, first-generation students often face real structural disadvantage, and they also enter higher education with cultural knowledge, family commitments, resilience, and forms of capital that institutions may fail to recognize.

This first component of the literature review is organized around three thematic areas. The first theme, formative context and identity origins, considers how socioeconomic background, family dynamics, community responsibility, and inherited access to college knowledge shape students before they enter higher education. The second theme, identity and belonging in higher education, focuses on how institutional norms, cultural mismatch, class stigma, belonging, and support practices shape students’ experiences while enrolled. The third theme, post-graduation identity and long-term class mobility, addresses what happens after degree completion, when graduates may continue to navigate class dislocation, family obligation, professional identity, debt, achievement guilt, and the feeling of living between social worlds.

Across these themes, this review identifies what is known about low-income, first-generation students and graduates, where the literature overlaps, and where important gaps remain. The literature suggests that social class mobility through higher education is not only an academic or economic process. It is also relational, psychological, cultural, and identity-forming. This framing is especially important for understanding graduates, whose experiences of class mobility may continue after degree completion.

Theme 1: Formative Context and Identity Origins

The first theme concerns the social and familial world participants carry into higher education. National data show that first-generation college students are more likely than continuing-generation students to come from lower-income households and to face layered barriers before and during college (Cataldi et al., 2018; Redford & Hoyer, 2017). The older but still influential Pell Institute report by Engle and Tinto (2008) framed college success for low-income, first-generation students as a matter that extends beyond access alone. This point is central to the study because social class mobility begins long before college enrollment. Economic scarcity, family obligations, neighborhood conditions, and limited access to inherited college knowledge shape how students interpret higher education as an opportunity, a risk, a disruption, or a duty.

Bourdieu’s (1986) concepts of cultural, social, and economic capital show how higher education often rewards inherited familiarity with academic life. Students from middle and upper-class families are more likely to arrive with knowledge of how college works, how to speak its language, and how to move through its systems. Low-income, first-generation students may be just as capable, but they are often asked to learn these hidden rules while already being judged by them. In higher education, cultural capital can appear as knowing how to approach faculty, how to navigate offices, how to present oneself as academically confident, or how to interpret the hidden expectations of college life. Yet Yosso (2005) pushes back against deficit interpretations by emphasizing aspirational, familial, social, navigational, linguistic, and resistant capital within marginalized communities. For low-income, first-generation graduates, the issue is not that they arrived without culture, knowledge, or value. They arrived with all of those things. The problem is that higher education often recognizes only certain kinds of cultural capital, especially the kind more commonly inherited by students from middle and upper-class families.

Family context is especially important because first-generation students often experience college not simply as an individual accomplishment, but as something deeply connected to their families, communities, responsibilities, and sense of identity. Covarrubias et al. (2019) found that first-generation students often become more independent without fully separating from their families. Their college experience is shaped by ongoing family responsibilities, which challenges the idea that student development always means moving away from home. Vasquez-Salgado et al. (2015) similarly showed that first-generation Latino students can experience conflict between family obligation and individual academic expectations. These findings are useful because while the sample for this research extends beyond a Latino population, the literature shows that higher education frequently asks students to inhabit an individualistic developmental model that may clash with familial responsibility, interdependence, and community accountability.

Covarrubias and Fryberg (2015) described family achievement guilt as a socioemotional experience that can arise when first-generation students perceive that educational progress separates them from family or positions them as surpassing loved ones. The literature on family achievement guilt gives this theme particular emotional depth. Covarrubias et al. (2020) later developed a scale grounded in first-generation student voices, showing that guilt is not simply a private feeling but part of a patterned social experience. More recently, Williams et al. (2024) extended this idea into the post-graduate period by showing how first-generation graduates may experience achievement as both a source of pride and a source of emotional distance from family or community. Their work suggests that upward mobility can create a difficult kind of loss, not because graduates fully leave their former lives behind, but because their relationships to home, family, and self may no longer feel as stable or familiar. In this way, family achievement guilt links formative background to long-term identity development, showing how family sacrifice, obligation, and upward mobility can continue shaping graduates’ sense of self well after college.

Resilience appears throughout the literature on low-income, first-generation students, but it is most useful when understood as a response to structural constraint rather than as evidence that hardship is educationally productive. Framing resilience this way allows the literature to recognize students’ persistence, resourcefulness, and agency without minimizing the inequities that made such resilience necessary. Azmitia et al. (2018) found that educationally resilient first-generation students often frame dropping out as unacceptable because of their own aspirations and because of what their success represents for family and community. This finding is important because it pushes against deficit-based narratives that portray low-income students as academically fragile, rather than as capable students navigating unequal conditions. At the same time, resilience should not be used to excuse institutions from responsibility. Low-income, first-generation graduates may carry extraordinary persistence, but the need for extraordinary persistence can itself reveal structural inequity.

Taken together, this literature suggests that students do not arrive in higher education as blank slates. Low-income, first-generation students may enter college carrying family loyalty, financial constraint, community responsibility, pride in survival, uncertainty about institutional expectations, and limited familiarity with the cultural rules of campus life. For that reason, their precollege identities should not be understood only in terms of what they lacked. The literature also makes it necessary to consider what students valued, protected, and carried with them as they moved into higher education.

Theme 2: Identity and Belonging in Higher Education

The second theme focuses on what happens when students move through higher education itself. The strongest recent literature in this area concerns cultural mismatch, belonging, class stigma, hidden curriculum, and institutional support. Stephens et al. (2012) argued that many U.S. universities organize themselves around independent norms such as self-expression, personal choice, and individual exploration. Those norms may align more closely with middle-class socialization than with the interdependent norms more common in working-class contexts. Phillips et al. (2020) later showed that cultural mismatch can persist beyond admissions, shaping continuing experiences inside the institution.

Goudeau et al. (2025) synthesized this line of research by explaining social class disparities through mismatches between academic contexts and working-class socialization contexts. Cultural mismatch helps explain identity disruption without treating the student as the problem. When higher education defines belonging through norms such as comfort with office hours, unpaid campus involvement, confident self-promotion, residential immersion, and familiarity with elite cultural codes, low-income, first-generation students may experience discomfort as personal failure. The mismatch is not simply between the student and college, but between the student’s lived experience and an institution that often presents middle-class familiarity as natural belonging. Jury et al. (2017) help show why class inequality in higher education cannot be reduced to tuition costs, financial aid, or academic preparation. Low-socioeconomic-status students also navigate emotional strain, identity management, self-doubt, and motivational pressures shaped by the institutions around them. In that sense, social class operates not only through money, but through the psychological and cultural conditions of campus life.

Belonging research helps explain how institutional environments shape the lived experience of class mobility. Gopalan and Brady (2020) showed that sense of belonging is nationally relevant to student experience and should not be treated as a soft or secondary concern. Means and Pyne (2017) found that low-income, first-generation students understood support and belonging through relationships, campus climate, and access to resources. Museus et al. (2018) similarly emphasized the importance of culturally engaging campus environments, arguing that belonging depends in part on whether students experience their cultural identities as valued. Although much of this research focuses on students during enrollment, it remains useful for understanding how graduates may later interpret their college experience. Graduates may remember college not only in terms of degree completion, but in terms of whether they felt understood, wanted, and able to belong without leaving central parts of themselves behind.

Institutional structures also shape whether students can convert effort into opportunity. Jack (2016) showed that academic engagement at elite universities is influenced by acquired cultural capital, particularly whether students know how and when to ask for help. This is a powerful finding for low-income, first-generation research because “asking” is not a neutral act. It can require trust, prior knowledge, and a sense of entitlement to institutional resources. Students who have been socialized to avoid burdening others, distrust authority, or solve problems privately may be misread as disengaged when they are actually navigating unfamiliar rules.

Class stigma and class-based identity management are also central to understanding how low-income, first-generation students experience higher education. Warnock and Hurst (2016) described low-income identity as both invisible and stigmatized, making it difficult for students to organize around and difficult for institutions to recognize. Loveday (2016) adds an important emotional dimension by showing how shame can become attached to class background, leaving students to experience institutional mismatch as personal inadequacy. Allan et al. (2016) similarly linked social class and classism to differences in student outcomes among first and continuing-generation students. Together, these studies suggest that graduates may remember college not only as a place where they learned academic material, but also as a place where they learned to monitor their speech, clothing, spending, family background, and sense of legitimacy.

The literature on cultural mismatch, class stigma, and belonging shows that low-income, first-generation students may come to understand institutional discomfort as personal inadequacy. A related body of intervention and strengths-based research is useful because it shows that this interpretation can be changed. In this context, intervention research refers to studies that examine intentional educational strategies designed to change how students understand their college experience. Stephens, Hamedani, et al. (2014), for example, studied a difference-education intervention, which taught students that social class, family background, and first-generation status can shape how college feels and what challenges students encounter. This approach helped students understand difficulty not as evidence that they did not belong, but as part of navigating an institution whose expectations are often easier to recognize for students from more privileged backgrounds. Stephens, Brannon, et al. (2014) described the broader principle behind this work as fortifying students' school-relevant selves, the part of identity that tells a person they belong in college and can succeed there, and they argued that strengthening it reduces social class disparities in higher education.

Strengths-based research extends this point by challenging the assumption that low-income students should be understood mainly through disadvantage. Bauer et al. (2025) developed an identity-reframing intervention that improved achievement among students from low-income backgrounds by emphasizing the strengths connected to their lived experiences. Nguyen (2023) similarly examined how low-income students succeed in college by focusing on the strengths, strategies, and forms of knowledge they bring with them. This work contributes to a more asset-oriented understanding of student success by showing that low-income students should not be understood only through disadvantage or need.

Together, these studies suggest that the problem is not the student’s background itself, but how higher education interprets that background. When institutions treat low-income, first-generation identity as a weakness, students may experience class difference as shame, inadequacy, or evidence that they do not belong. When institutions name structural inequality and recognize the value students bring with them, students are less likely to interpret discomfort as personal failure and more able to understand it within a broader institutional context.

This literature is important for understanding belonging, institutional support, and identity development during higher education. Supportive practices are not limited to financial aid, tutoring, or retention programming. They may also include faculty who explain hidden expectations, staff who respond to economic constraint without shame, curricula that validate working-class experience, policies that reduce unpaid participation burdens, and institutional language that frames first-generation and low-income students as capable members of the academic community rather than exceptions to it.

Theme 3: Post-Graduation Identity and Long-Term Class Mobility

The post-graduation period remains one of the least developed parts of the literature on low-income, first-generation students. Much of the research follows students until they persist, belong, or graduate, as if the degree itself closes the story. For many graduates, however, crossing the stage does not end the experience of crossing class lines. It may make that crossing more visible. A graduate may leave college with new credentials, professional norms, and occupational aspirations, while still carrying family obligations, economic precarity, debt, impostor feelings, and the uneasy sense of living between social worlds.

Research on social mobility shows that crossing class lines is not only an economic or educational transition. It is also an identity transition. Graduates may gain credentials, professional language, and access to new spaces, while still carrying the habits, loyalties, discomforts, and attachments formed before college. Friedman (2016) described this as a divided habitus, meaning the emotional strain that can emerge when a person’s class background and new social position do not fully fit together.

Lee and Kramer (2013) examined habitus and social mobility at selective colleges, showing that students do not simply replace one class identity with another as they move through higher education. Instead, they learn to navigate old and new ways of seeing, speaking, behaving, and belonging. Reay et al. (2009) similarly described working-class students in elite universities as “strangers in paradise,” a phrase that captures how access to prestigious academic spaces can coexist with alienation. Together, these studies show that social mobility is not only a change in educational status. It can also require graduates to live with competing senses of who they were, who they have become, and where they now belong.

Abrahams and Ingram’s (2013) concept of the chameleon habitus also helps explain how students adapt across different social worlds. The term describes the ability to shift between contexts with different expectations, languages, values, and ways of belonging. For low-income, first-generation graduates, post-graduation life may require movement among family, professional, academic, and peer contexts that operate with different assumptions about money, ambition, language, and selfhood. A graduate may become fluent in multiple class codes without feeling completely at home in any of them.

Psychological research on socioeconomic status and identity adds another layer to this discussion. Destin et al. (2017) argued that socioeconomic status shapes how students understand themselves, what opportunities they see as available, and how they interpret their own motivation and behavior. Stephens et al. (2024) similarly called for a social-class-in-context perspective, which treats class not as a personal trait carried by the individual alone, but as something experienced through specific environments, relationships, and institutional expectations. These perspectives suggest that post-graduation identity is not fixed at the moment of degree completion; it continues to be shaped through changing relationships to family, work, professional spaces, debt, mobility, and belonging.

Several recent studies begin to address what happens after degree completion or in advanced stages of higher education. Williams et al. (2024) examined family achievement guilt among first-generation graduates, showing that the emotional and relational consequences of educational mobility can continue after college. Murphy et al. (2025) examined doctoral education as a site where social mobility, classism, identity, and belonging intersect. Although doctoral education represents only one pathway within the broader population of low-income, first-generation graduates, this work shows that advanced education can intensify questions of class identity rather than resolve them. Meza et al. (2024) found that first-generation college graduates reported depressive symptoms in midlife similar to those of continuing-generation graduates, complicating deficit-based assumptions while still keeping attention on long-term wellbeing.

Economic outcomes are also important because post-graduation identity is shaped by material conditions, not only by feelings of belonging or self-understanding. Fry (2021) reported that first-generation college graduates lag behind continuing-generation graduates on key economic outcomes, including household income and wealth. This finding complicates the idea that earning a degree fully erases class origin. A first-generation graduate may be educationally mobile while still remaining economically vulnerable compared with peers who inherit stronger family wealth, professional networks, and intergenerational safety nets. The degree may expand opportunity, but it does not necessarily equalize the social and economic field.

For this reason, graduation is better understood as a transition point than an endpoint. Post-graduation identity may include pride, grief, guilt, responsibility, distance from family, a desire to give back, anxiety about being exposed as out of place, and uncertainty about whether one belongs in professional or academic spaces. It may also include relief, confidence, and a reconstructed sense of agency. The gap in the literature is not that scholars have ignored first-generation students altogether. The gap is that low-income, first-generation graduates have not been sufficiently centered as narrators of what class mobility feels like after higher education has done what it promised to do.

Synthesis of the Literature

Across the three thematic areas, the literature suggests that social class mobility through higher education is cumulative rather than episodic. The experience does not begin when a student arrives on campus, and it does not end when a degree is completed. Instead, the literature shows a continuous relationship among formative background, institutional experience, and post-graduation identity. Students enter higher education already shaped by family systems, economic conditions, community values, and varying degrees of familiarity with college norms. Once enrolled, those backgrounds encounter institutional expectations that may either recognize or devalue the knowledge students bring with them. After graduation, the consequences of that encounter may continue as graduates interpret what mobility has meant for their relationships, work, class identity, and sense of self.

One major overlap across the literature is the importance of family and relational identity. Research on first-generation students consistently challenges the assumption that higher education is experienced only as an individual accomplishment. Family obligation, family pride, achievement guilt, and community responsibility appear across the literature as central forces shaping how students understand educational success (Covarrubias & Fryberg, 2015; Covarrubias et al., 2019; Covarrubias et al., 2020; Williams et al., 2024). This theme connects formative background to long-term identity development because family remains part of the mobility story even after the student earns the credential. Graduation may produce pride and opportunity, but it may also produce distance, guilt, or uncertainty about one’s changing relationship to home and community.

A second overlap concerns the relationship between institutional norms and students’ sense of belonging. The literature on cultural mismatch, belonging, and class stigma shows that higher education institutions often treat middle-class norms as neutral expectations rather than as classed ways of moving through academic life (Goudeau et al., 2025; Jury et al., 2017; Phillips et al., 2020; Stephens et al., 2012). This is important because students may interpret institutional discomfort as evidence that they personally do not belong. Belonging is therefore not simply a feeling of social comfort. It is connected to whether students can see themselves as legitimate members of the academic community without having to erase central parts of their background. Research on campus climate, institutional support, and culturally engaging environments reinforces this point by showing that belonging is shaped through relationships, resources, and institutional recognition (Gopalan & Brady, 2020; Means & Pyne, 2017; Museus et al., 2018).

A third overlap is the tension between deficit-based and asset-based interpretations of low-income, first-generation students. Bourdieu’s (1986) work helps explain how higher education rewards inherited forms of economic, social, and cultural capital, while Yosso’s (2005) community cultural wealth framework challenges the idea that students from marginalized or low-income backgrounds arrive without valuable knowledge. This tension appears throughout the literature. On one hand, low-income, first-generation students often face real structural barriers, including limited access to college knowledge, financial pressure, class stigma, and reduced access to institutional networks. On the other hand, the literature also documents resilience, family commitment, navigational skills, community responsibility, and other forms of knowledge that are often overlooked by institutions (Azmitia et al., 2018; Nguyen, 2023). The strongest reading of the literature is not that these students are either disadvantaged or resilient. They are often both. Their resilience should be recognized, but not used to romanticize the hardship that made such resilience necessary.

A fourth overlap concerns identity management across different social worlds. The literature on social mobility shows that crossing class lines often requires people to navigate multiple codes of language, behavior, ambition, money, and belonging (Abrahams & Ingram, 2013; Friedman, 2016; Lee & Kramer, 2013; Reay et al., 2009). This connects directly to the higher education literature on cultural mismatch and class stigma. Students may learn how to succeed in academic and professional spaces while also becoming more aware of the distance between those spaces and the worlds they came from. Post-graduation identity may therefore involve more than upward movement. It may involve ongoing translation between family, work, academic, and peer contexts. The graduate may gain access to new spaces while still feeling the emotional weight of earlier class experiences.

Finally, the literature overlaps around the idea that institutional success and personal resolution are not the same thing. Access, persistence, and graduation are important, but they do not fully capture the psychosocial consequences of educational mobility. Economic outcome research further complicates the success narrative by showing that first-generation graduates may continue to experience economic disadvantage compared with continuing-generation graduates, even after earning a degree (Fry, 2021). Psychological and social-class-in-context perspectives also suggest that class identity is shaped through relationships, institutions, and changing material conditions, not only through individual achievement (Destin et al., 2017; Stephens et al., 2024). Across the literature, degree completion appears less like the end of class mobility and more like a transition into a new stage of identity work.

Overall, the literature shows that low-income, first-generation students and graduates cannot be understood through a single lens. Their experiences are shaped by family history, institutional culture, economic inequality, belonging, stigma, resilience, and the long-term meaning of mobility. The overlap across these areas supports a view of social class mobility as relational, psychological, cultural, institutional, and material. This synthesis also points toward the need for research that listens to graduates themselves as they make sense of what changed, what remained unresolved, and what it meant to move through higher education without fully leaving their earlier class worlds behind.

Critique of the Literature

The literature provides a strong foundation for understanding low-income, first-generation students, but much of it is still organized around what happens before graduation. Studies often focus on access, persistence, belonging, academic performance, and degree completion (Cataldi et al., 2018; Gopalan & Brady, 2020; Ives & Castillo-Montoya, 2020; Means & Pyne, 2017; Redford & Hoyer, 2017). These are important measures of student success, but they do not fully capture the human consequences of moving through higher education from a low-income, first-generation background. A more complete view has to ask how students were shaped by the experience, what challenges they carried into college, what barriers made college harder than it needed to be, and what the degree actually prepared them to navigate beyond the credential itself. Graduation may change a person’s opportunities, but it does not necessarily settle questions of identity, family obligation, economic position, professional belonging, or access to social networks. In many cases, higher education continues to assume forms of middle-class social capital that low-income, first-generation students may not have inherited (Bourdieu, 1986; Jack, 2016; Stephens et al., 2012). Those assumptions can follow students through the degree and beyond it, leaving graduates to reconcile new credentials with ongoing economic pressure, limited networks, class uncertainty, and the unresolved question of where they now fit.

First-generation status is often treated as if it carries the whole account of disadvantage. Students whose parents did not finish college share one important experience, but they do not share one economic reality. National data show that first-generation students are more likely than continuing-generation students to come from lower-income backgrounds, but first-generation status and low-income status are not identical categories (Cataldi et al., 2018; Redford & Hoyer, 2017). Some first-generation students come from financially stable homes. Others grow up in poverty or near poverty. When the literature collapses these students into a single category, the specific weight of income, wealth, debt, and family resources can disappear from view. Social class mobility depends not only on whether a student is the first in the family to graduate, but also on the material conditions from which that student is moving. A low-income, first-generation graduate and a more financially secure first-generation graduate are not necessarily moving the same distance.

The relevant research is also split across conversations that rarely meet. Work on family achievement guilt explains the emotional cost of mobility (Covarrubias & Fryberg, 2015; Covarrubias et al., 2020; Williams et al., 2024). Work on cultural mismatch and belonging explains how institutions shape a student’s sense of legitimacy (Goudeau et al., 2025; Phillips et al., 2020; Stephens et al., 2012). Work on habitus and social mobility explains the divided self that can form when people cross class lines (Abrahams & Ingram, 2013; Friedman, 2016; Lee & Kramer, 2013; Reay et al., 2009). Work on economic outcomes shows that a degree does not equalize material conditions (Fry, 2021). Each literature is strong on its own. Read separately, however, they fragment the graduate’s experience into parts that no single study fully holds together.

Much of the most useful conceptual work is set in elite or selective institutions, focuses on students still enrolled, or examines a specific racial or ethnic group (Jack, 2016; Lee & Kramer, 2013; Reay et al., 2009; Vasquez-Salgado et al., 2015). These studies are meaningful within their own contexts, but they do not represent the full range of low-income, first-generation graduates. A graduate who finished an associate degree and entered the workforce may experience class mobility differently than a doctoral student inside an elite department. Both experiences matter, but the literature has not yet shown enough about how mobility is narrated across associate, bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral pathways.

The literature also has to be careful about how it describes low-income, first-generation students. Research on barriers, stigma, cultural mismatch, and psychological strain is necessary because these studies identify the institutional and social conditions students are forced to navigate (Jury et al., 2017; Loveday, 2016; Warnock & Hurst, 2016). At the same time, if the focus remains only on barriers, students can begin to appear as people defined primarily by disadvantage. Strengths-based research helps correct that by naming resilience, community cultural wealth, and the strategies students develop to move through institutions that were not always built with them in mind (Azmitia et al., 2018; Nguyen, 2023; Yosso, 2005). Yet this approach also has to be handled carefully. When resilience is celebrated without also naming the inequality that made such resilience necessary, the language can start to sound like bootstrapping. It can imply that students succeed because they endure hardship well enough, rather than asking why higher education required so much endurance from them in the first place.

The deeper limitation is not only that low-income, first-generation graduates are underrepresented after graduation. It is that their experiences are often interpreted through measures that stay close to retention: whether they entered, persisted, belonged, performed, and completed. Those measures tell part of the story, but they do not fully show what students were expected to already know, what forms of social capital they were assumed to have, or how those assumptions shaped their lives during and after college. Higher education often claims to prepare well-rounded graduates, yet low-income, first-generation students may leave with unresolved questions about income, professional networks, class identity, family obligation, and belonging. In that sense, the issue is not only whether college changed their lives. It is whether college recognized the systemic barriers that made the experience harder than it needed to be. Research on social capital, cultural mismatch, and class inequality helps explain how these pressures are built into higher education itself (Bourdieu, 1986; Jack, 2016; Stephens et al., 2012). What remains less developed is the graduate’s own account of these consequences. Listening to low-income, first-generation graduates after degree completion can show what the credential made possible, what it failed to resolve, and what future students may need if higher education is serious about holistic student development rather than simply counting students as retained or completed.

Additional Research Needed

Additional research is needed on what social class mobility means for low-income, first-generation graduates after degree completion. There is a breadth of literature on access, persistence, belonging, academic performance, and completion, but these areas do not fully explain what graduates carry forward once they leave college (Cataldi et al., 2018; Gopalan & Brady, 2020; Ives & Castillo-Montoya, 2020; Means & Pyne, 2017; Redford & Hoyer, 2017). Future research should give more attention to how graduates describe the meaning of mobility in their own words: what changed, what remained unresolved, and how they understand the long-term consequences of crossing class lines through higher education.

More research is also needed that keeps low-income status central to the study of first-generation graduates. First-generation status is only part of the story. It does not fully explain the material conditions that shape social class mobility. Students whose parents did not complete college may still differ widely in household income, family wealth, debt burden, access to professional networks, and financial support. Future research should avoid treating first-generation graduates as one economic group. A clearer focus on low-income, first-generation graduates would help show how mobility is shaped not only by being first in the family to earn a degree, but by the economic distance between where graduates began and where higher education allowed them to go.

Future research should also give more attention to differences across degree pathways. Low-income, first-generation graduates may share broad experiences of class mobility, but those experiences may not look the same across associate, bachelor's, master's, and doctoral education. A graduate who earns an associate degree and enters the workforce may face different questions of income, belonging, and opportunity than a doctoral graduate navigating academic prestige and professional class codes. The literature would benefit from more attention to how mobility is experienced across these educational routes rather than assuming that one degree pathway can stand in for all.

Additional research should also connect parts of the literature that are often studied separately. Formative background, the college years, and post-graduation life are usually treated as distinct areas of research. Yet for graduates, these experiences are not separate. Early class background shapes how students enter college, college shapes how they understand belonging and opportunity, and post-graduation life reveals what the degree changed or failed to resolve. Research that asks graduates to connect these stages in their own words can show social class mobility as one continuing process rather than a set of disconnected moments.

Several questions follow from these gaps. How do low-income, first-generation graduates describe the way social class shaped them before, during, and after college? What did mobility cost, what did it make possible, and what did the degree leave unresolved? How do graduates account for belonging, family obligation, professional identity, income, social capital, and class identity from the distance of hindsight? Questions like these move the field beyond whether higher education produced mobility and toward what that mobility actually felt like.

Research built around these questions would do more than add another account of student success. It would give voice to a stage of mobility that retention and completion data cannot reach: the stage where graduates make sense of who they became, what they carried with them, and what higher education did or did not prepare them to navigate. It would also push higher education toward a fuller idea of holistic student development. Completion counts how many students finish. Future research should also ask how well the degree prepared graduates to understand themselves, their opportunities, and the classed worlds they continue to move through.

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