2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

A university is designated as a Hispanic-serving institution (HSI) when at least 25% of the undergraduate student population self-identifies as Hispanic/Latinx, of which half must have a low-income background. Even though institutions are emphasizing and making great strides in how they serve their students, graduate students are often omitted from the conversation. The challenges faced by first-generation college students (undergraduate and graduate) are exacerbated due to recent legislation in some states putting forth anti-DEI measures. In particular, it is known in the literature that first-generation graduate students face challenges in exercising their social and cultural capital, navigating social processes, and maintaining persistent beliefs. First-generation students have lost many of the support mechanisms that were previously made available to them, and they must seek out other resources, if any, such as student organizations and student success programs with significantly lower or in some cases, no budgets [1]. Students may also be forced to rely on grassroots efforts to build their own support systems and lead DEI efforts, understandably at a much smaller scale. Without intentional effort to serve graduate students at HSIs, these students are left with an ongoing lack of institutional support. This paper presents a plan to recruit, interview, and compare the experiences of 9 first-generation graduate students in STEM majors from three, 4-year HSI universities to understand how potential changes in resources and support systems are affecting their degree progression in light of emerging anti-DEI policies. University A resides in a historically conservative state where anti-DEI legislation was passed, University B also resides in a historically conservative state, but with access to DEI programs, and University C resides in a liberal state with similar access to DEI programs. Despite having an HSI designation, the political climate of each state plays a significant factor in those student experiences. For students at University A, there was a keen interest in understanding the barriers and obstacles students faced as a result of newly passed anti-DEI legislation. At University B, recent state budget cuts have resulted in the closure of a satellite campus and reduced students’ access to scholarships. University C is not facing similar legislative pressures; therefore, its students will provide a strong perspective on the impact of DEI initiatives. Despite this proposed group structure, today’s political climate is volatile and still evolving, which may affect the overall study and its findings. Thus, this study will serve as a pilot to uncover initial findings based on the current DEI landscape at each institution. Semi-structured interviews will be used to uncover the ways first-generation graduate students navigated graduate school and leveraged institutional resources to support their persistence beliefs. The data will be analyzed using thematic analysis to allow for common themes among the students’ experiences and beliefs to emerge within and across institutions. The results from this study aim to inform other universities, minority-serving or not, about the importance of maintaining their DEI initiatives and provide insight into effective institutional support mechanisms for first-generation graduate students. Furthermore, the experiences of these graduate students will shed light on policy changes needed for institutions to effectively serve all their students, particularly graduate students, within the context of their state legislation.