Sociology student Wendy Puquirre has identified a major resource for college students from disadvantaged backgrounds — siblings who have already attended college.
As a part of her recently-completed master’s research, Puquirre found that there is a positive correlation between the GPA and overall academic performance of Hispanic and African-American students and the number of siblings they have who also attended college. Surprisingly, the data show that there is an inverse correlation for white and Asian students — the more siblings those students have in college, the worse their academic performance.
Puquirre, a first-generation student, received her master’s degree last month during the campus’s 10th commencement ceremony. She also received her bachelor’s degree from UC Merced in 2013.
She suspects that older siblings may act as role models for underrepresented students. Alternately, parents may be better prepared to their younger children through the college experience because they have already gone through the process with older siblings. Unfortunately, the data is not detailed enough for Puquirre to draw these kinds of specific conclusions, but she hopes her work will prompt other researchers to identify the different resources that disadvantaged students utilize to successfully navigate the education system.
“If we want to try to better support underrepresented students, then we need to better understand their experiences,” Puquirre said. “This is a great start, but there are so many factors that still need to be examined.”
As part of the McNair Scholars program during her junior and senior year, Puquirre first came across the work of Indiana University professor Brian Powell, who has researched siblings and their affect on academic performance, specifically engaging with something called the Resource Dilution Model.
The model argues that the larger the number of children who are close in age within a family, the fewer resources are available to each child. For example, if a family has four closely-spaced children, they will likely struggle to put the younger children through college, because the older children have already used up available resources.
Since Puquirre’s own experience was so different from that of the white, middle-class families that are often overrepresented in the large datasets used to test the Research Dilution Model — “My family was concerned with putting food on the table and buying basic supplies like notebooks, not planning for college tuition and expenses,” she explained — she was drawn to the idea of doing more significant research on the subject as a graduate student
Originally, Puquirre dreamed of continuing her research with Powell at Indiana. But family responsibilities at home in Los Angeles made leaving California in 2013 impossible. Her undergraduate advisor, sociology Professor Irenee Beattie, suggested that she apply to the founding cohort of the UC Merced sociology Ph.D. program rather than giving up on her graduate studies.
“I’m so glad she did — it was the best thing for me,” said Puquirre. “That founding cohort of the sociology program was made up entirely of students of color, and everyone was working on issues of inequality. Coming from disadvantaged backgrounds and sharing a passion for social justice made it the most safe, encouraging space in which to work.”
As she was completing her master’s research in November of 2014, Beattie approached Puquirre again — this time to encourage her to pursue the original plan of applying to the Ph.D. program at Indiana. “She walked me through all my options and let me know that I could complete my master’s and be in a perfect position for the transition to Indiana,” Puquirre said. “Not many faculty mentors would do that.”
Puquirre was accepted to Indiana and will join the sociology Ph.D. program at Indiana University in the fall. She will work with Powell and continue to explore the general topic of siblings and underrepresented students — she hopes to begin a related mixed-methods Ph.D. project that collects and examines qualitative as well as quantitative data.
“It’s bittersweet,” Puquirre said. “I’m excited to go to Indiana and continue my research, but I’ve been here for six years. This place — this program — has been my home.”
