Social lunch -- Peter Belmi (UVA Darden). Zoom.

Many would argue that college is the great equalizer and once completed, individuals who hold a 4-year degree should be able to reap the rewards a college education has to offer. In this paper, we investigate what happens to first-generation (“first-gen”) college students when they disclose to potential employers that they are the first person in their family to go to college. Conventional wisdom reflects that many people in the United States are enamored with stories of people who pulled themselves up by the bootstraps, and the reality is that only 36% of adults over the age of 25 in the U.S. possess a bachelor’s degree, making completion of a college degree an elite marker that some might wish to guard. We contend that graduates who disclose that they are the first in their family to go to college are evaluated less favorably compared to equally-accomplished graduates who make no such disclosures, because many gatekeepers in mainstream, middle-class organizations tend to believe that the effects of people’s origins and initial circumstances in life are permanent and long-lasting. We test this theory with a large-scale randomized resume audit study across the United States (N = 1,785) and a large follow-up experiment (N = 5,013). Consistent with our social-deterministic account, our experiments revealed that applicants who disclosed that they were a first-generation graduate were less likely to receive callbacks than were applicants who made no such disclosure, and that these unfavorable evaluations emerge only when evaluators were personally inclined to believe in social determinism: that a person’s social character is shaped profoundly and permanently by their social background and upbringing.