There are large inequalities in who enrolls in four-year collegiate programs, who finishes, and why. In this article, we draw on several waves of the Educational Longitudinal Study, explore family disadvantages, and uniquely highlight challenges first-generation students face. Family resources, cultural capital, and college-focused parental actions and their consequences for high school achievement explain most of the college attendance disadvantage. Inequalities in college completion, however, are notably also explained by disparate stressors, the need to work, and limited social/curricular integration while in college. We discuss these patterns and what they reveal about inequality and the limitations of contemporary college access.

Using The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health), I examine stress exposure and depressive symptoms among first and continuing-generation college students before and during college. I find that first-generation college students experience more stressors during both adolescence and college attendance and higher levels of depressive symptoms during adolescence as compared to continuing-generation students. During college, however, first-generation students’ level of depressive symptoms is no different from their continuing-generation peers even before adjusting for stress exposure and adolescent depressive symptoms. The gap in symptoms closes because first-generation college students’ mental health improves while attending college, as they have significantly fewer depressive symptoms than they did during adolescence. Continuing-generation students, on the other hand, did not display a significant difference in their depressive symptoms between adolescence and college attendance. Possible explanations for these findings are discussed.

Although empirical work has shown that personal and spousal education are both related to health, the nature of these associations has been harder to establish. People select into marriages on the basis of observed and hard-to-observe characteristics, complicating the job of the researcher who wishes to make causal inferences. In this article, we implement a within-sibling-pair design that exploits variation within pairs in spousal education to generate estimates of spousal crossover effects. Results—based on a long-term study of siblings and their spouses—suggest that spousal education is positively related to health, but to a greater degree for women than men. Sensitivity analyses show that these patterns are unlikely to derive from measured differences between individuals or unmeasured characteristics that sort them into unions. These results are consistent with network-based theories of social capital, which view education as a resource that can be mobilized by network ties to enhance health.