“We’ve got a bit of a family mantra that you don’t give up”: A cross-national study of first-in-family students’ persistence at university

Numerous studies consider the reasons why students, particularly those from historically underrepresented groups, decide to depart university prior to completing their studies. Much of this attrition research focuses on the problems students encounter during their studies and the ways these issues might curtail their ability to sustain academic engagement. In this paper, we instead focus on the ways in which students, all of whom are first in their families to attend university, persist in their studies. Drawing on cross-national qualitative data from three discrete but complementary studies (N = 174) we conceptualise and use the lens of ‘mantras of persistence’ to investigate how broader processes of socialisation help students to enact persistence, which we identified in our research via the sayings, ‘maxims,’ or stories that learners applied to their university journeys. Our narrative data highlights three dominant mantras utilised by students, suggesting that there are fundamental commonalities in the norms, values, practices and discourses that first-in-family learners draw on to navigate higher education, despite differences in age, gender, field of study, and geographic context. However, we also demonstrate how these mantras are interwoven with neoliberal relations of power as well as the hidden emotional and affective work that first-in-family learners often engage in during their studies. We argue that recognising the importance of such mantras and how these may diverge from the normalised values or expectations within higher education settings is key, particularly if universities genuinely wish to improve the retention of students from more disadvantaged backgrounds.