Movin’ on up (to College): First-Generation College Students’ Experiences With Family Achievement Guilt Rebecca Covarrubias University of Delaware Stephanie A. Fryberg University of Washington As the first in their families to attend college, first-generation college students (FGCs) experience a discrepancy between the opportunities available to them and those available to their non-college- educated family members that elicits family achievement guilt. The present studies examined family achievement guilt among an ethnically diverse sample of FGCs and continuing-generation college students (CGCs), those whose parents attended college (Studies 1 and 2), and tested a strategy to alleviate such guilt (Study 2). In Study 1, on open-ended and closed-ended measures, FGCs (N = 53) reported more guilt than CGCs (N = 68), and Latinos (N = 60) reported more guilt than Whites (N = 61). Latino FGCs reported more family achievement guilt than the other 3 groups. In Study 2, we examined whether reflecting on a time when one helped family would alleviate family achievement guilt for FGCs. Specifically, FGCs (N = 58) and CGCs (N = 125) described a time they helped their family with a problem (help condition) or did not describe an example (control), then completed the guilt measure. Analyses revealed that (a) consistent with Study 1, FGCs reported higher guilt than CGCs and minorities reported more guilt than Whites, and (b) FGCs in the help condition reported significantly less guilt than FGCs in the control condition and reported no differences in guilt from CGCs across conditions. Finally, perceptions of family struggle mediated this relationship such that reflecting on helping one’s family led to perceiving less family struggle, which led to less family achievement guilt for FGCs. Keywords: family achievement guilt, first-generation college students, interdependence, cultural mismatching My parents have greatly suffered in the course of time. I have such a connection with my family that I have felt much guilt coming to the university. I feel that I have such a luxury with independence and they are suffering everyday. These thoughts have made me consider drop- ping out of college and start working full-time to aide my family. (First-generation college student, 19 years old) I’ve always experienced [guilt], not only in college but in high school as well. My mother didn’t even finish junior high and I’m the only one in my family to finish high school, as well as go onto college. It’s been difficult because there are many times when I have no one to relate to what I’m going through. (First-generation college student, 18 years old) Going away to college is often the first step for first-generation college students (FGCs; i.e., those who are the first in their families to attend college) to achieve a higher social class (Lubrano, 2003). As the opening quotes suggest, however, this transition to college creates uncertainty and conflict because it highlights economic and cultural discrepancies between the working-class home environment and the middle-class university environment (Day & Newburger, 2002; Pascarella & Terenzini, 1991; Stephens, Fryberg, Markus, Johnson, & Covarrubias, 2012). Piorkowski (1983), for example, theorized that because of their academic success, low-income African American FGCs reported feeling like “survivors” because they “escaped” adversity in the home environment (e.g., alcoholism, financial struggles, etc.). In other words, they experienced guilt because they earned the op- portunity to attend college and, in doing so, surpassed the achieve- ments of close others in their working-class home context. This experience of being the lone person to surpass the achieve- ments of family members has been referred to as survivor guilt 1 (O’Connor, Berry, Weiss, Schweitzer, & Sevier, 2000; Pi- orkowski, 1983; Whitten, 1992). Piorkowski argued that when students were more successful than their families, they grappled with the stress caused by a realization that family members did not have the same chance of attending college (i.e., that inequalities exist in society) and that family members were struggling at home while they experienced more privileges and pursued more oppor- tunities in college. FGCs were left to simultaneously feel proud of their academic successes and concerned about how going away to college impacted their family (Piorkowski, 1983; Whitten, 1992). 1 The term “survivor guilt” has been applied to individuals who have survived natural disasters or large-scale atrocities (e.g., Hiroshima, Nazi concentration camps; Danieli, 1985, 1988; Neiderland, 1961), to individ- uals with anorexia nervosa (Friedman, 1985), and to veterans of the Vietnam War (Glover, 1984). This article was published Online First September 8, 2014. Rebecca Covarrubias, Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, University of Delaware; Stephanie A. Fryberg, Department of Psychology, University of Washington. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Rebecca Covarrubias, Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, University of Delaware, 108 Wolf Hall, Newark, DE 19176. E-mail: rcovarrubias@ psych.udel.edu This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly. Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology © 2014 American Psychological Association 2015, Vol. 21, No. 3, 420 – 429 1099-9809/15/$12.00 http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0037844 420