Demographic Aging and the First-in-Family University Student; The New Zealand Experience.

Philip Morrison, Victoria University of Wellington
Louise McMillan, School of Mathematics and Statistics, Victoria University of Wellington
Ivy Liu, School of Mathematics and Statistics, Victoria University of Wellington
Adam Glucksman, School of Mathematics and Statistics, Victoria University of Wellington

As populations age international competition for skill increases and universities compete more vigorously for new students both at home and abroad. One consequence is a growth in the proportion of students who are first in their family to attend university. Currently they make up between a quarter and a third of all new enrolments in most OECD countries. Increasingly drawn from working-class, colonised, immigrant and refugee families, first-in-family students are believed to face more obstacles in obtaining advanced education because the learning environment is culturally different from their own. One of the consequences is believed to be their lower level of psychological wellbeing. Similar stereotypes of first-in-family students prevail in New Zealand but without convincing empirical evidence. The purpose of our paper is to question the prevailing narrative by comparing the university experience of first-in-family students with those whose parents and siblings are graduates. We model several dimensions of psychological wellbeing across the two categories of first year students at Victoria University of Wellington in 2019, 2020 and 2021. We control for age, sex and ethnicity, school background, health, financial status and family support and find that first-in-family status interacts with several attributes in lowering wellbeing and raising psychological distress.

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