Who Matters and How: Parental Communication in First-Generation College Graduates’ Academic and Career Pathways

This brief mixed-methods manuscript examines how first-generation college graduates (FGCS) perceived parental involvement in their academic and career development. Parents shape vocational anticipatory socialization (VAS) through everyday communication, yet FGCS often navigate these processes without parental models of higher education. Survey data from 275 FGCS showed that when participants were asked to identify the parent most involved in their academic pathways and career decision-making, they most frequently named mothers. Open-ended responses about career choice, however, revealed that parental involvement was often remembered less as the work of one clearly distinguishable parent and more as a shared, collective, or diffuse family process. Thematic analysis demonstrated that parents shaped FGCS’ career decision-making, often in relation to academic pathways, through three primary communicative practices: support, pressure, and role modeling. These findings suggest that attribution-based measures capture important patterns of maternal salience, while open-ended accounts reveal the relational and communicative ways parental involvement is remembered and experienced. By integrating quantitative patterns with qualitative nuance, this study contributes to VAS scholarship by showing not only which parents FGCS identify as influential, but how parental communication shaped their pathways to academic and career success.