<p>How do schools know if you’re first generation or not? What if one of your parents went to a foreign school and another to a community college?</p>
<p>A lot of time the colleges can tell by your parents’ jobs. Also, if the college interviews you, they may catch you in a lie about your parents’ education. This happened to a student when I interviewed him. At the beginning fo the interview, he said that neither parent had gone to college. Later in the interview, he was describing his interest in an academic subject, and when I asked him how he got interested, he said he had been reading his dad’s college textbooks.</p>
<p>Then, when I reminded him about how he’d said earlier that his dad hadn’t gone to college, he told me that he had forgotten that his dad went to college. Sure…</p>