The most dangerous student on campus

Let's hear from the repeat customers

The most dangerous student on an American college campus is the one whose mother went to college. Universities cannot say this out loud, but they have spent the last decade building an institutional apparatus designed to make sure she does not speak. Or rather, to make sure she does not tell her child to demand more for what the family is paying. Except for a blip during the pandemic, you have not heard loud public voices from college-educated parents or grandparents in this era of widespread critique of higher education. Universities cannot risk the close scrutiny of parents who went to college themselves, especially those who use AI every day.

Over the last decade, higher education has elevated the first-generation college student to the moral and promotional center of campus life. This is all to the good – upward mobility and educational opportunities are what America is all about. But anyone who has stepped on a campus recently knows that “first gen” has become a fetish, as a former administrator put it to me yesterday. Every campus website and calendar features first-gen panels, first-gen stoles, first-gen pride, first-gen belonging.^¹ As much as I support first-gen students I also see how convenient this is for muting college-educated mothers (fathers too) who are grumbling among themselves about the declining value proposition of college.

Every business textbook will tell you that acquiring a new customer costs five to seven times more than retaining an existing one.² In nearly every consumer-facing business, repeat customers are prized because they testify that the product was good enough to buy again. American higher education is the exception. The symbolic economy on campus today is totally lopsided. Outside the small legacy niche at elite privates, students from households that have bought college before have almost no public identity at all. These are students whose mothers have a lot to say and have not been saying it. Let’s call the broader category “repeat customers.” Their mothers paid tuition once and are paying it again.

Higher education has been under intense competitive pressure to recruit students since the beginning of the enrollment cliff in 2010. Even as universities are cutting and consolidating programs, the voices of parents or grandparents are rarely heard. Instead, there are critics, consultants, and colleges themselves, offering competing narratives about student success, workforce development, and return on investment. The voices the institution does not want to hear are the ones around the multi-college family dinner table, where mothers say what they would never say in an alumni survey: “What the heck is this?” “This is what I’m paying for?” “It actually doesn’t have to be this way.”³

The name “repeat customer” captures behavior over time. The student belongs to a household that has already purchased higher education and brings prior purchase memory: what college used to cost, what counted as rigor, how much faculty time students once received, how simple it was to get a signature and know whether you were going to graduate on time, what the degree later proved worth. The memory lives in parents as well as in siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents. Repeat customers arrive with a baseline the institution did not create and cannot control.

I see countless think pieces about support, access, inclusion, persistence, belonging, and student success.⁴ I see almost nothing about purchase memory, product comparison, and seller accountability, even though parents who went to college have a lot to say about how the product has gotten so bad that “navigation” through bureaucratic mazes and required apps is the rule, not the exception. College-educated parents can see how syllabi have changed to become long legal documents, how “virtual” office hours or advising meetings are not the same thing, how a “digital course packet” may be cheaper but not better than the books college-educated parents still have on their bookshelves. They may be more willing to ask inconvenient questions like “why do things this way and not the old way?” Those who use AI in their work or their daily life may be asking particularly hard questions about the value of higher ed in the AI era.

Students with educated parents who have opinions are not a niche. Outside the narrow legacy category,⁵ repeat customers are the majority of college students. Roughly seventy percent of undergraduates have at least one parent with some college, whether at an Ivy, a regional public, a community college, or through a transfer path.⁶ These students arrive with anecdotes, warnings, expectations, and price memories at a moment of shrinking enrollment and a weak post-graduation market. They talk to their parents about whether the education is worth it, whether the institution resembles the one their parents knew, and whether the promised payoff still exists. Fragile institutions fear these conversations.

But in the “first gen” celebration era, having parents who see how things have changed over time can be treated as morally suspect.⁷ I have watched repeat customers hedge, deny, or speak cautiously about their parents’ experience. And so the student population with the sharpest comparative knowledge of the product, who can question the institution most sharply, can feel pressure to apologize for possessing the ability to critique.

Why are new customers valued over old?

If new-customer acquisition costs so much more than retention, why has higher education organized its public face around the first-time buyer, beyond the fact that the university prefers customers it can manage? Because first-time buyers, first-gen students, come attached to money and services, and they supply a flattering moral script.⁸ First-generation status sits inside a preexisting funding and support infrastructure, including Pell eligibility, TRIO programs, state first-generation grants, and foundation support.⁹ Repeat customers just pay tuition, and if they are comparison shoppers, may require discounting to compete with the other options.¹⁰

First-gen students have more uplifting narratives. Fragile institutions with shrinking enrollment, merged majors, fewer full-time faculty, and a softening labor-market payoff need gratitude narratives more than they need comparison narratives. “I overcame obstacles to get here” is useful publicity. “My parents paid less and got more” is not.

Family memory is imperfect of course. It includes nostalgia, exaggeration, selective memory, and generational bragging. It also includes real knowledge about what college used to cost, how much reading used to be assigned, what counted as a serious course, how professors used to behave, and what the degree used to buy in the labor market. The phrase they hear most often is simple: “used to be.” When enough households converge on the same conclusion, private disappointment becomes public illegitimacy. Repeat-customer families are external auditors whether the institution likes it or not.

The double subsidy

For most of the twentieth century, the college student’s family and community were a key source of support for navigating college, especially during the enrollment growth with the GI Bill. A relative who went to college could explain what office hours were, what a registrar was, what a minor was, how to drop a class, how to write a professor, what a prerequisite meant, how to read a transcript. The institution did not have to pay anyone to do this work. When institutions began recruiting first-gen students in substantial numbers in the twenty-first century, they had to scale up internally. Benjamin Ginsberg has famously chronicled the rise of the all-administrative university. The expansion of the student success apparatus is a direct internalization of labor previously outsourced to family and community. Universities today have a robust and expensive apparatus of advisors, first-year experience offices, belonging coordinators, navigation coaches, retention specialists, wellness teams, and directors of student thriving.¹¹ All of this is now part of the tuition bill. But it is not a stable equilibrium.

College-educated parents see what’s going on and are not quiet at home. They see how much they are paying for things that are not education. They want more faculty time for their tuition dollars, smaller classes, clearer academic value, cleaner labor-market payoff. Non-elite institutions are already seeing the consequence: melting yield, rising discount rates, the collapse of the small private college sector, enrollment declines at regional publics in the Midwest and Northeast. The repeat customer is leaving.¹²

What a college-educated mother sees today is different from what she last complained about in 2020. The thinness of what she saw on Zoom is now what AI can deliver for free. The essay her daughter “uploads” to a “platform” (rather than “hands in”) will likely either be written by an LLM or graded by one. The AI chatbot advisor her child is discussing next semester’s classes with is an AI chatbot. The kids have been vibe-coding in their bedrooms since high school. The college-educated mother is holding the tuition bill in one hand and the price of a Claude subscription in the other, thinking “one of these is a better investment than the other.”

In the drive to fill seats, schools optimized for enrollment first and service efficiency second. Satisfying the first-time buyer is cheaper. The institution sells a managed pathway through graduation: advising, mentoring, bridge programs, belonging work, financial-aid guidance, career coaching, and enthusiastic communication to parents who have not been to college themselves. Institutions acquired the cheaper customer and are losing the expensive one.

Uplifting versus unhappy

Why is the story I’m telling here not often told? First-generation students are our national story: courageous, deserving, upwardly mobile, and socially beneficial. A sector that agrees on almost nothing agrees on this. Funders, accreditors, administrators, faculty senates, advancement offices, trustees all celebrate “first gen” success. They are the moral center of campus discussion, and shift attention away from what the institution owes every student who pays to attend it.

Except for legacy celebrations at the elite institutions where I have studied and taught, I have never in all my years in higher ed seen an event geared toward the repeat-customer experience, asking them to compare their education to their parents’ or grandparents’ experience. I have never seen a non-legacy repeat customer student take to the stage at graduation to compare their college education to their parents.

I have seen dozens of first-gen speeches, and they are always among the happiest speeches on the program: gratitude, obstacles overcome, parents thanked, mobility achieved. Universities benefit when the dominant language is navigation, belonging, mentoring, and support because all of that keeps the spotlight on the journey into college. There is no equivalent repeat-customer speech because “arrival” isn’t the point as much as whether the experience will live up to stories grown up with. Comparison is the main subject a precarious institution cannot risk having publicly.

The “first gen” category is useful in multiple political directions, neutralizing rigor critiques from the left and supplying a safer equity language under pressure from the right. After the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, administrators turned to first-generation status as the legally durable replacement for race-conscious admissions language; the president of the Council for Opportunity in Education described the term as “positive, fair, politically acceptable.”¹³ First-generation is class-based. It crosses race lines. It plays in red states where DEI offices are being defunded.¹⁴ It gives institutions under political pressure a safe equity category to pivot toward without abandoning the moral framing they had developed under the prior regime. The conservative legislator who would defund a diversity office finds it harder to defund a first-generation center. Once first-gen becomes the safe moral language, continuing-generation complaint becomes even harder to stage publicly without sounding reactionary or exclusionary.

Enrollment of first-generation students is an input metric. Completion of first-generation students is a throughput metric. Neither requires the institution to show what its graduates know, what they can do, what they earn, what they owe, or whether their degree carries value. Bryan Caplan calls this signaling. I am calling out the incentives to silence the customers who can tell whether the signal still means anything.¹⁵

The category on the other side of first-gen is itself a conceptual mess. “Continuing-generation” is an administrative dumping ground that collapses radically different households into one residual class: the child of two doctorates, the child of one parent with some college, the child of a mother who transferred once and left, the child of a father with a bachelor’s degree earned under very different market conditions. That false aggregation helps the institution. It turns the repeat customer from a witness class into statistical background noise and hides the financially precarious households whose comparative knowledge would complicate the moral simplicity of the current story.¹⁶

There is no standard narrative for the repeat customer. Repeat customers are likely the most unhappy students trying to square what they hear at home and what they are being told on campus. These are the students we should listen to.

Institutions that remember

The country’s most prestigious colleges and universities are prestigious in part because their business model is built on repeat customers and a strong alumni donor base. This group includes elite liberal arts colleges with deep alumni networks, flagship state universities in states where attending the flagship is a family tradition, religious institutions where graduates send their children, HBCUs with multi-generational alumni loyalty, service academies, and arts conservatories. They share multi-generational customer loyalty, accumulated and protected as an asset. A strong endowment is the financial expression of multi-generational customer loyalty compounded over centuries. Elite universities celebrate first-generation students as a supplement to the core model, not as the core model.¹⁷

The unanimity of first-gen celebration across funders, accreditors, administrators, faculty senates, and the press is the measure of how badly the institution needs a celebration narrative. The silence of every other student population is the measure of how badly the institution needs to keep those who see quality slipping to keep quiet. Higher education needs to face its repeat customers and defend the value of a university education on the merits.

The customer-management strategy was rational under pre-AI conditions. It is no longer rational for a university to be organized around scaled delivery of generic content to buyers who cannot compare it to anything else. The college-educated mother is the first to notice.

If “first-gen” means what institutions say it means, its ultimate success would be its own disappearance. If the future universities imagine still requires a permanent first-gen apparatus, that is not a vision of equality. It is an admission that they expect the underlying divide to remain.

1. The institutional infrastructure organized around the first-generation category is substantial. The Council for Opportunity in Education (COE) and the FirstGen Forward Network (housed at NASPA’s Center for First-generation Student Success) coordinate the annual First-Generation College Celebration each November 8, a date marking the 1965 signing of the Higher Education Act. FirstGen Forward reports a network of more than 470 member institutions, with grant programs, toolkits, logos, social media kits, event-planning guides, a peer-reviewed Journal of First-generation Student Success, and professional development resources distributed to member campuses. Sponsorship of celebration grants has come from TIAA, MasteryPrep, and Strada Education Network. See FirstGen Forward, “About the Network,” https://firstgen.naspa.org; Council for Opportunity in Education, “First-Generation College Celebration,” https://firstgencelebration.org. For sociological critique of the category itself, see Tina Wildhagen, “Not Your Typical Student: The Social Construction of the ‘First-Generation’ College Student,” Qualitative Sociology 38 (2015): 285–303, and Wildhagen, “The Rise of the First-Generation College Student: A Ubiquitous Category in Need of Critical Analysis,” Critical Sociology (2026, online first); Thai-Huy Nguyen and Bach Mai Dolly Nguyen, “Is the ‘First-Generation Student’ Term Useful for Understanding Inequality? The Role of Intersectionality in Illuminating the Implications of an Accepted—Yet Unchallenged—Term,” Review of Research in Education 42, no. 1 (2018): 146–176; Sally Patfield, Jennifer Gore, and Leanne Fray on the limitations of the binary in deficit framing.

2. The claim that acquiring a new customer costs substantially more than retaining an existing one is most commonly associated with Frederick Reichheld’s loyalty research at Bain & Company. See Frederick F. Reichheld, The Loyalty Effect: The Hidden Force Behind Growth, Profits, and Lasting Value (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1996). The frequently cited “five to seven times” figure should be understood as a kind of handy rule rather than a fixed empirical constant; estimates vary by industry and study, with some analyses suggesting higher multiples. The broader finding of the loyalty literature is consistent: customer retention is significantly less costly and more profitable than continual acquisition. See also Frederick F. Reichheld and Rob Markey, The Ultimate Question 2.0: How Net Promoter Companies Thrive in a Customer-Driven World (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2011).

3. On the substitution of euphemism for substantive change in higher-education marketing language, see the Delta Cost Project’s longitudinal analyses of institutional spending categories, which show classroom-instruction spending falling as a share of total expenditures while academic support, student services, administration, and maintenance rose. See also Robert E. Martin, The College Cost Disease: Higher Cost and Lower Quality (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2011); Benjamin Ginsberg, The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

4. The closest adjacent literature treats continuing-generation students as the comparison group rather than as a category worth interpreting in its own right. See, for example, the National Center for Education Statistics, “First-Generation Students: College Access, Persistence, and Postbachelor’s Outcomes” (NCES 2018-421); Markle and Stelzriede, comparative studies on first- and continuing-generation outcomes. Laura T. Hamilton’s Parenting to a Degree: How Family Matters for College Women’s Success (2016) is a good resource. A 2024 study by Kennedy Honors, Dustin Grabsch, Kalkidan Desta, and Sheri Kunovich on the connotations of the “continuing-generation” term found that 18 of 21 interview participants reacted neutrally to the label, many described it as the norm or default, and 8 said they had never encountered the term outside the study. Steven Dandaneau (2025) argues that first-gen functions as a cohort defined by institutional criteria rather than as an organic identity. Danielle Stallworth, Danielle Maurici-Pollock, and Sasha Khan, “What We Talk About When We Talk About ‘First-Generation Students’: Exploring Definitions in Use on College and University Websites,” College & Research Libraries 86 (2025), documented substantial definitional variation across institutional websites.

5. Yale’s official fall 2025 class profile reports 1,640 enrolled first-years and 11% legacy affiliation, yielding approximately 180 legacy students in that cohort. Aggregating the eight Ivy League institutions plus Stanford and MIT yields approximately 17,925 first-years per entering cohort. Applying Yale’s 11% rate across that entire intake produces approximately 1,972 legacy students; applying Stanford’s published 15.4% figure (which includes donor-connected students as well as legacies) produces approximately 2,760. MIT explicitly states it does not consider legacy or alumni relations in admissions. Adding Duke and the University of Chicago raises the entering-cohort total to approximately 21,384; forcing the 15.4% rate across all twelve schools yields approximately 3,293. The “approximately 4,000” figure is therefore a generous one-cohort overestimate for an Ivy-Plus basket. Across all four undergraduate years the total would be substantially higher, but still represents a small fraction of the roughly 16 million undergraduates enrolled in U.S. degree-granting institutions. Sources: Yale University Office of Institutional Research, fall 2025 class profile; Stanford University Common Data Set; institutional class profiles for Princeton, Harvard, Brown, Dartmouth, Cornell, Columbia, Penn, Duke, and Chicago.

6. NCES data indicate that 44.5% of undergraduates have a parent with a bachelor’s degree or higher, plus 31.7% with some postsecondary parental education, meaning roughly three-quarters of current undergraduates have at least one parent with some college exposure. A recent NCES-based undergraduate fact sheet reports that 25.8% of undergraduates in 2019–20 were “first-generation” under the narrow definition that neither parent had attended college, implying that 74.2% had at least one parent with some college experience. Common App’s 2022 domestic first-year applicant data show 62.8% had a parent with at least a bachelor’s degree, and 54.2% had a parent who earned that degree before the student was born. FirstGen Forward, using a broader all-undergraduate headline statistic, reports that 54% of undergraduates are first-gen under a “parents did not complete a four-year degree” framing, which would imply roughly 46% have at least one parent with a four-year degree. The variation across these figures reflects definitional plasticity: Common App researchers identified more than 100 plausible definitions of first-generation status, with the count of first-generation applicants ranging from 304,338 to 709,850 depending on which definition is used. See Common App, First-Generation by Definition: Access and Success Among Variably Defined First-Generation College Students (Arlington, VA: Common App, 2024).

7. For sociological analysis of how ease and inherited familiarity with educational institutions are currently theorized as forms of exclusionary privilege, see Shamus Rahman Khan, Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul’s School (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011). On the institutional management of these dynamics and the deployment of diversity rhetoric to protect institutional reputation, see Sara Ahmed, On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012). For a contemporary examination of how the knowledge-economy elite navigates the moral friction between egalitarian commitments and inherited cultural capital, see Musa al-Gharbi, We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2024). The rhetorical positioning of family precedent as morally ambiguous can be traced through the programmatic materials of first-year experience offices and orientation programs at major research universities.

8. The customer-acquisition-at-all-costs vocabulary migrated into higher education administration during the 2000s and 2010s, driving the sector's market-share-at-all-costs- mindset. See the consulting literature surrounding “enrollment management” as a professional field, and the parallel growth of higher-ed-specific customer relationship management platforms (Slate, Salesforce Education Cloud, Ellucian). The shift was institutionalized through the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers (AACRAO) and the National Association for College Admission Counseling (NACAC). For broader context on the corporate growth-at-all-costs model that universities absorbed, see the WeWork, Uber, and broader unicorn-economy literature, including Reeves Wiedeman, Billion Dollar Loser: The Epic Rise and Spectacular Fall of Adam Neumann and WeWork (New York: Little, Brown, 2020).

9. Federal funding streams include the TRIO programs (Talent Search, Upward Bound, Student Support Services, Educational Opportunity Centers, McNair), authorized under the Higher Education Act of 1965 as amended, with eligibility criteria explicitly including first-generation status. Title III and Title V institutional aid programs are codified at 20 U.S.C. §§ 1057–1068h and 1101–1103g. First-generation status correlates closely with Pell Grant eligibility; see RTI International, First-Generation College Students: Demographic Characteristics and Postsecondary Enrollment (Washington, DC: NASPA Center for First-Generation Student Success, 2019). Major foundation streams include the Lumina Foundation’s A Stronger Nation initiative; the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation postsecondary success strategy; and the Aspen Institute’s College Excellence Program. State first-generation grant programs include Florida’s First Generation Matching Grant Program, which triples donor contributions. Donor-funded examples include Duke University’s DukeLIFE program ($18 million challenge fund with $40 million goal); Southern New Hampshire University’s first-generation scholarship, reported as the institution’s most successful digital crowdfunding campaign; and the University of Central Florida’s first-generation scholarship infrastructure.

10. NACUBO’s 2024–25 tuition discounting study reports a 56.3% average institutional discount for first-time, full-time undergraduates at participating private nonprofits, with nearly 90% receiving institutional grant aid. Urban Institute’s IPEDS-based analysis estimates net tuition and fees at 80–84% of educational revenues at private nonprofit four-year institutions from 2010 to 2019, with private bachelor’s colleges collecting only 54% of gross tuition by 2019 after discounting. By contrast, at Yale, net tuition plus room and board accounts for approximately 8% of the FY26 operating budget, with endowment income at approximately 34%. WICHE projects that the number of high school graduates peaks in 2025 and declines steadily through 2041, with 38 states below their 2023 levels by 2041. See WICHE, Knocking at the College Door: Projections of High School Graduates, 2024 edition.

11. NCES data show that at private nonprofit four-year institutions in 2020–21, the largest core-expense category was the combined block of academic support, student services, and institutional support, at 40% of core expenses, or approximately $20,400 per FTE student. Instruction was 39%. A 2025 IPEDS-based analysis summarized in Inside Higher Ed found the median four-year institution spending more than $4,800 per student on support services and nearly $3,000 on academic support in 2022–23. The Department of Education’s 2024 student-success playbook centers “data-driven improvement,” “holistic advising,” and “wraparound services”; FirstGen Forward’s landscape work describes successful first-gen strategy as involving “wholesale changes” to identification, programming, and service design. For longitudinal data on the growth of administrative and student-services spending relative to instructional spending, see the Delta Cost Project’s published series and the National Center for Education Statistics, Digest of Education Statistics, annual editions. On the broader administrative growth pattern, see Benjamin Ginsberg, The Fall of the Faculty (2011); on the 1977 first-year experience movement and its expansion, see John N. Gardner and Betsy O. Barefoot’s work at the National Resource Center for the First-Year Experience and Students in Transition at the University of South Carolina.

12. For data on melting yield and tuition discounting at private nonprofits, see the NACUBO annual Tuition Discounting Study. On the closure rate of small private colleges, see Higher Ed Dive’s tracker of college closures and mergers, which documented over 100 closures between 2016 and 2024. On enrollment declines at regional publics in the Midwest and Northeast, see National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, Current Term Enrollment Estimates, semiannual reports. For analysis of the demographic and economic forces behind these declines, see Nathan D. Grawe, Demographics and the Demand for Higher Education (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), and Grawe, The Agile College: How Institutions Successfully Navigate Demographic Changes (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021).

13. Sara Weissman, “Varied Definitions of ‘First Generation’ Confuse Students,” Inside Higher Ed, August 3, 2023. The “positive, fair, politically acceptable” formulation is attributed in the article to Maureen Hoyler, president of the Council for Opportunity in Education. Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, 600 U.S. 181 (2023).

14. For state-level DEI legislation passed since 2023, see the Chronicle of Higher Education’s “DEI Legislation Tracker,” which documents bills in Florida, Texas, North Carolina, Tennessee, Iowa, Utah, Indiana, Alabama, and other states restricting or eliminating diversity offices, training requirements, and hiring practices. The simultaneous expansion of first-generation programming in many of these same states is documented in coverage from Inside Higher Ed and the Chronicle from 2023 through 2025.

15. Bryan Caplan, The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018). On accreditor requirements for disaggregated student-success outcomes including first-generation status, see Higher Learning Commission, Criteria for Accreditation (revised 2020), Criterion 4 on teaching and learning; Middle States Commission on Higher Education, Standards for Accreditation and Requirements of Affiliation, 14th ed., Standard V; WSCUC, 2023 Handbook of Accreditation, Standard 2. TRIO disaggregation requirements appear in the Higher Education Act and implementing regulations at 34 C.F.R. Part 643 et seq. For the gap between input/throughput metrics and learning-outcome demonstration, see Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), and the follow-up Aspiring Adults Adrift: Tentative Transitions of College Graduates (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). See also Joshua Travis Brown Retention is the new Recruiting.

16. Sarah Nolan et al., Common App, 2026 brief on first- and continuing-generation completion outcomes, summarized in “Rethinking First-Generation Labels,” Inside Higher Ed, February 23, 2026. The brief reports six-year completion rates ranging from 58% to 78% within the first-generation category and from 70% to 92% within the continuing-generation category, depending on specific parental-education configuration. For the earlier definitional-plasticity work, see Brian Heseung Kim, Elyse Armstrong, Mark Freeman, and Trent Kajikawa, First-Generation Status in Context, Part One: Trends in Parental Education and Family Structures Over Time (Common App, 2023). For institutional definitional inconsistency, see Danielle Stallworth, Danielle Maurici-Pollock, and Sasha Khan, “What We Talk About When We Talk About ‘First-Generation Students’: Exploring Definitions in Use on College and University Websites,” College & Research Libraries 86 (2025).

17. For the structural role of endowments and alumni cultivation in elite-private finance, see Harvard University, Annual Financial Report, FY2024 and FY2025; John R. Thelin, A History of American Higher Education, 2nd ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), on the institutionalization of alumni giving and reunion class structures. On the legacy preference as a retention instrument rather than a meritocratic distortion, see Daniel Golden, The Price of Admission: How America’s Ruling Class Buys Its Way into Elite Colleges—and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates (New York: Crown, 2006), and the Harvard Students for Fair Admissions litigation record on the operational role of legacy admissions in alumni cultivation.