The Newbury Center’s two leaders, Anthony Abraham Jack and Maria Erb, at the center’s January grand reopening (left). Students participating in team-building activities (right).

Campus Life

How BU Became a National Model and Destination for First-Generation Students

A generous gift and two impassioned leaders in Maria Erb and Anthony Jack helped give rise to Boston University’s Newbury Center. Students say it’s been life-changing.

It started, like many things in the world of higher education, with a report: in 2018, this one landed on the desk of Robert A. Brown, who was in his 13th year as the president of Boston University. His own education experience had been both bumpy and gratifying—a University of Texas at Austin graduate, he was the first member of his family to attend college, but it all happened on what he says was “a financial shoestring.”

The report was one of those good-news, bad-news documents. The good news was that BU was doing a better job than ever helping provide need-based financial aid and Pell grants to first-generation students—and that the graduation rate for those students was excellent. The bad news? Those same first-gen students were not experiencing or enjoying BU in the same ways as their peers with college-educated parents and from typically more affluent backgrounds.

It was as if they were attending BU—but not truly able to appreciate the full BU experience.

“The first-gens had fewer internships and fewer of them studied abroad,” Brown recalls. “The report pointed to the need for resources and advising.”

Fast forward to today, and the changes that began under Brown, including the launching of BU’s Newbury Center for first-generation students in 2021, continue under BU’s 11th president, Melissa Gilliam. They have turned BU into a nationwide model for other universities to follow when it comes to admitting, welcoming, and supporting first-gen students. The timing could not be more urgent: today, one in every two college students in America identifies as first-gen, meaning their parents do not hold a bachelor’s degree. Here at BU 20 percent of undergraduates are first-gens—approximately 3,400 students.

Maria Dykema Erb, the executive director of the Newbury Center, was a first-gen student herself, a Korean transracial adoptee who grew up in a Dutch immigrant family on their Vermont dairy farm. She says BU is creating something she wished her college experience included.

“We want to be a first-generation destination,” Erb says.

A gift brings opportunity 

For BU, opportunity knocked in April 2019. The president of Newbury College called Brown to explain that the small, private liberal arts institution in Brookline, Mass., which served a significant portion of first-generation students, was shuttering after more than 50 years, and the school wanted to distribute its funds in a way that kept its name and mission alive.

Brown, along with Jean Morrison, then University provost, drafted a plan to endow a new facility at BU, called the Newbury Center, to help first-gen students, who often come from low-income families, thrive at BU. “It was our commitment to the center and to need-based financial aid that led to them awarding us the gift that named the center,” Brown says.

With a $6 million gift from Newbury College, the ribbon-cutting and opening of the Newbury Center, in the basement of BU’s School of Theology, happened in fall 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, and those on hand wore masks. But while they were forced to stand apart physically, the Newbury Center’s small staff, under Erb, began working immediately to bring people closer together.

After the center was relocated for a few months to Cummington Mall in 2024 for renovations, its grand reopening in January 2025, with a ceremony attended by Gilliam, featured an expanded space, including individual offices for staff, a new conference room, and a newly expanded multipurpose area for studying or for first-gen students, or Terrier F1RSTS, to use for meetings and gatherings. 

“Our first-generation students bring rich experiences, perspectives, and talents to our community and make Boston University much stronger overall,” Gilliam says. “Moreover, our commitment to our Terrier F1RSTS is critical to our mission as a university that was founded, and remains to this day, a place that is open to all qualified students, no matter their background. This founding commitment to access and inclusion is part of what makes us who we are.”

The Newbury Center helps first-gen students navigate the financial aid system and develop financial literacy, offers programs to help students know where to turn for academic support and how to make the best use of the many available resources that ensure academic success, including writing programs and course selection advice, and encourages students to take advantage of internships and study abroad opportunities. It also offers cohort and mentoring programs to help foster a sense of belonging on campus. 

A video tour of the Newbury Center. Video by Nicolas Rocca

In addition, the center has organized group trips for students to attend cultural events, like the Boston Ballet’s production of The Nutcracker, held cooking demonstrations and weekly drop-in sessions, and offered programs for both learning and personal development. And in a strategic move to broaden its role on campus, it supports graduate and professional students—not just undergrads. 

The center helps connect students with personal librarians who assist with research projects, and it holds an annual graduation pinning ceremony and a ceremony for the BU chapter of Tri-Alpha, an honor society for first-generation college students, faculty, and staff. 

In March 2022, through a collaboration with the Center for Career Development, the Newbury Center launched the BU Professional Clothing Closet, an initiative led by first-gen student Tima Dasouki (Pardee’22), which provides students with low-cost rental of professional clothing to wear on job interviews, career fairs, and work. For fun, there are regular games of Bingo, weekly “Fuel Up Fridays” which offer free coffee and bagels, movie nights, and support groups—all with the intention of helping first-gen students build their personal BU community.

A light went on

Students who have experienced the Newbury Center’s offerings say it’s nothing short of life-changing. Maelee Chen (CAS’22) was at BU before the Newbury Center opened, and after. “BU carved out a place that is small, but mighty,” Chen says. 

She says the biggest challenge first-gen students encounter is not their regular coursework. It’s the so-called “hidden curriculum” of university life. 

“The Wheelock Food Pantry [now the BU Food Pantry] was one example,” Chen says. “Not many students knew it existed. There are certain facets of university life, maybe [other] students heard about it from their parents, but things like office hours, or job opportunities at school, or how to conduct oneself at a professional job interview, or having to work on spring break rather than go on a vacation,” that are challenging.

She says when the Newbury Center opened, it was as if a light went on for BU first-gens. Chen, a founding member of the BU First-Gen Low Income Partnership (FLIP), attended an etiquette dinner the center hosted and learned basic life skills no classroom or professor could have taught her.

“On some level, I am not sure the discomfort will ever go away,” she says of being a first-gen student. “But I am now at Harvard Law School, and part of what the Newbury Center did was make me feel more comfortable.”

Clarence Perez-Meija (Sargent’22), whose family is from Ecuador but who was raised in New York City, is another student helped by the Newbury Center. Now a research assistant at Weill Cornell Medical College, he still remembers the way the center impacted his first-gen campus experience almost from its first day.

“It was like navigating a maze,” he says of his early days at BU. “You don’t know when you are going to hit a dead end, and one of my goals was to be set up for a master’s program. But I couldn’t just reach out to my family. It was a lot of trial and error.”

The arrival of the Newbury Center his senior year, he says, allowed him to “leverage opinions to see what I could do after graduation.” His conversations with Erb and others shaped his next steps and allowed him to think about taking care of his family while also pursuing his career. And he also went out of his way to help other first-gen students follow his path.

“Mentorship has always been important to me,” Perez-Meija says. “Whenever I did meet freshmen and sophomores, I would always introduce myself, just try and provide input to them. It was helpful to share my experiences on how to negotiate an internship or develop a relationship with a faculty member. The Newbury Center provides a safe space, where students can fully be themselves. And it helps them with any backlash they might be feeling, without worrying about the consequences.” 

A national model 

Not many people know the first-generation higher education landscape as intimately as Deana Waintraub Stafford, vice president of FirstGen Forward, a national organization that supports 400 institutions, including BU, and their first-gen students. She says 54 percent of students today identify themselves as being first-generation. She also says that what BU has done with the Newbury Center is special.

“Creating this dedicated space for a center like BU did is unique, because of how it’s centrally located,” Stafford says. “You often see centers living within a specific college, or only for graduate students, or for medical students. But the Newbury Center is centrally located and it supports undergrads, graduate students, professional students—it’s structured to do that, with a dedicated staff.”

The center makes it easy for first-gen students to build their community, create study groups, and find support during their transition to college life, she says. And because many first-gen students are outside the traditional 18 to 24 age range of most college students, there is a greater chance they may have dependents of their own to care for.

“If your students are working and have a full day of courses, you have to think differently about the ways you are creating opportunities for those students, who might not always be available between 8 am and 5 pm,” Stafford says. “The Newbury Center is a national model for supporting students like that.”

In addition to the center’s outreach to both graduate and undergraduate students, she says, what makes it unique is having a dedicated director connected to the faculty—Anthony Abraham Jack, an associate professor of higher education leadership at BU’s Wheelock College of Education & Human Development, who came to BU in 2023 from Harvard.

The student-faculty bridge

“It’s an amazing staff,” Stafford says. “Maria Erb is an incredible champion of first generation students, then you have Anthony Abraham Jack as a dedicated faculty member. Tony’s position opens an avenue for first-gen students who might have interest in research, for example. That’s such a position of strength.”

Jack, whose recent book, Class Dismissed: When Colleges Ignore Inequality and Students Pay the Price (Princeton University Press, 2024), has been critically praised and whose research examines the challenges lower-income undergraduate students face, says the Newbury Center is filling a critical void. In addition to connecting students to the right person, the right office, the right community, it offers a template for other schools. 

“One of the things that made me excited about coming to BU was the ability to expand and transform the Newbury Center from one that is student-facing to one helping all institutions set policy and practices in place to implement first-generation policy,” Jack says. “It’s about moving schools from who we admit to improving their everyday experiences. What can we do to make sure we are their bridge? We want to be a destination for first-gen students, and we need to be just as adaptable as a first-gen’s life is unpredictable.”

He says for the center to be successful, it not only has to succeed at BU, but has to help other colleges and universities succeed in the same way. “We want the center to be not just the operator, but also to ensure that other institutions around the country understand who their students are,” he says. “The Newbury Center has the potential to be that model for the country, because we don’t just support undergraduates. We support graduate and professional students. The ways in which inequality and poverty shape how students move through higher education have not been considered enough.”

That will only happen if the Newbury Center and other centers like it meet their students the moment they arrive, to ensure they “can be seen, heard, and welcomed,” he says.

“The biggest joy I have had,” Jack says, “is seeing the growth of individual students.”