<p>Hello
My husband has a Ph.D degree and I have a Master Degree from India.
My kids are in 9th and 11th grades, will they be considered as first- time college students as we both never went to school in the US
Thanks </p>
<p>No, I doubt it. The common app asks if the student’s parents attended college/university with no mention of country, so they would select that you both attended graduate school, the number of institutions you’ve attended, which institutions (and it allows you to select by country), and how many degrees.</p>
<p>I assume that non-common app schools ask similar questions.</p>
<p>Yep this is the same situation with my parents; college is college regardless of the country the degree is obtained.</p>
<p>They will be able to say they are first gen Americans.
It would not be accurate to say they are first gen college, as well.</p>
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<p>The point of identifying first generation college students is to break the cycle of poverty-- to give a leg up to kids whose mothers scrub hotel toilets, or whose fathers pick lettuce in the fields.</p>
<p>So, no, your family situation doesn’t come remotely close.</p>
<p>@GMTplus7 just wondering, how about a student who’s parents went to college and have Masters Degrees but had to give up their own career for the betterment of their child’s education?</p>
<p>Lots of educated people do that-- ever heard of stay-at-home-moms? I know lots of expat phDs, lawyers & doctors who are not working in their field of training bcs they are out of their home country. </p>
<p>The bottom line is that these educated parents already have the educational cultural ethic to pass on to their kids, as compared to uneducated laborers.</p>
<p>*
@GMTplus7 just wondering, how about a student who’s parents went to college and have Masters Degrees but had to give up their own career for the betterment of their child’s education?
*</p>
<p>That would be a choice. People with college degrees, and especially those with graduate degrees have many more choices than someone with barely a high school diploma.</p>
<p>I’ve always kind of wondered whether or not it makes a difference. I was both a first gen American and first gen college student and it never really seemed to matter. I don’t know. </p>
<p>Anyway, no, your children would likely not be first generation. If it’s for a scholarship criteria or something, I would call the company/fund/school/whatever and ask what their definition is. </p>
<p>Regardless of the country in which you got your education, the assumption is that your child grew up in a more enriched manner than someone whose parents are not as well educated. But I always thought the point of that question was that with more education, the parents have access to higher-paying work., which might be relevant for financial aid (though I have no idea how parental education is factored into the Expected Family Contribution).</p>
<p>Now, some immigrants who worked at high level jobs in their country of origin can no longer work at that level in the US That might be worth talking with financial aid about.</p>
<p>Compmom…financial aid is based on family income. So if those immigrant families are earning less money, that is ALREADY taken into consideration.</p>
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<p>I took this comment as sarcasm. </p>
<p>Be happy and proud you also were able to get college degrees- it won’t be held against you. Remember- never lie on any application. </p>
<p>There are so many, well, world class universities (Sorbonne, Oxford, Beijing, Oslo, Melbourne, Hong Kong etc.) how can the children of alumni from these schools possibly be first generation college? Further, people with Master’s and PhD’s definitely know the worth of and effort it takes to earn an education. </p>
<p>Read the question on the application carefully and answer it faithfully. It will ask for the education level of the parents. It never ask for their education level in the US.</p>
<p>I will take the poster’s word for it that it’s an honest question, but it kind of bugs me. Because it feels like an attempt to try to circumvent the system – “we’re highly educated in our country of origin, but we’ll get some kind of advantage if we deliberately read the question so narrowly that we say our kid is first-gen college student and then he / she will get some kind of bump.” It feels the same way it feels when you’ve got some white kid whose family is of Dutch origin from South Africa who wants to claim that he’s African-American or whatever. </p>
<p>It *is a *frequent question, but it is perplexing when a family does not think that their child being first generation American is enough to set them apart, they want to negate their own educational status as well.
But even if the question was not asked, its likely that their job titles would give it away.</p>
<p>Being as OP’s kid still has two more years of high school, I can tell you that worrying about the number of AP courses your high school jr will be taking is not something most parents of first gen college students do.
We are pretty oblivious until senior year, sometime not even then.</p>
<p>The OP seems to have left the room.</p>
<p>Some schools take into consideration that a student applying is a first generation college student because what that means is that the family may not have the intrinsic knowledge that those families do about what sorts of things are important to go to college. The student is a trail blazer of sorts in such cases. In some cases, it’s quite the gap such students are trying to narrow in going to college rather than to work, military, marriage.</p>
<p>Its difficult to steer your kids toward college, when even their grandparents don’t think they need to go.</p>