Teireik Williams wanted to be like other students at Penn State University, but reminders that he was different were everywhere on the flagship public campus where the cost to attend rivaled his family’s total income.

It was obvious to the South Oakland resident whenever he saw students driving cars paid for back home or heard them discuss exotic travel. But his sense of isolation wasn’t simply economic — or exclusively because he is an African-American at a largely white university.

Since neither of his parents holds a college degree, he differed from peers in another way: He could not count on advice and reassurance from adults back home who already had been through the academic pressures he was facing.

“Sometimes, it gets very lonely,” he said. “My mom wants to be there for me and pay for things that she can’t. Talking to her a lot of times, you can tell it hurts her.”

Even so, the broadcast journalism student with a passion for poetry did not fold. Now a senior at University Park, he is two semesters from the finish line and more at ease talking about his experience, something experts say is increasingly true of first-generation college students nationwide.

“I used to see shame in it, but now I’m kind of proud of it,” said Mr. Williams, 20, who has paid bills by working at a shoe store, a cafeteria and elsewhere. “I wasn’t afforded the resources that a lot of my peers were, but at the end of the day, I’m still here, striving to be successful and taking classes.

“And I’m going to have a degree,” he said. “I’m going to be something.”

It’s been over half a century since the GI Bill and other initiatives gave millions of families a shot at college and helped spawn the middle class. Even so, students from a sizable number of American households still have parents who lack a college degree.

About 20 percent of first-time, full-time students enrolling in four-year institutions identify themselves as first-generation college students, a share largely unchanged for a decade and a half, according to a survey by the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA.

It defined first-generation students as those whose parents never attended college, though others define it more loosely as students whose parents may have been in college but did not finish.

Either way, say experts, these students are trailblazers but also are more vulnerable to failure, partly because they lack confidence and sometimes feel like impostors — just a step ahead of being exposed.

The inequality is reflected in starkly different graduation rates.

Seventy-one percent of students starting at four-year campuses who are neither first-generation nor low-income earned a bachelor’s degree in six years, the Pell Institute in Washington, D.C., reported in 2011, using the most current data available. The share dropped to 51 percent for first-generation students and even lower — 32 percent — for first-generation students who also are low-income.

Harold Levy, executive director of the Virginia-based Jack Kent Cooke Foundation, knows firsthand the angst these students face. Before becoming a lawyer, venture capital investor and New York City Schools chancellor, he was a first-generation undergraduate at Cornell University in the 1970s.

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Even as he racked up good first-semester grades, said Mr. Levy, he was gripped with a sense he was a pretender. “I was in panic and fear that I would be found out and expelled,” he said.

Today, the foundation he directs helps highly promising students with financial need by offering scholarships of up to $40,000 yearly and other support. In April, it awarded an inaugural $1 million prize to Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., for efforts to enroll and graduate low-income students.

Of course, he and others say money alone isn’t the answer, since even gifted first-generation students lack social and cultural capital taken for granted in wealthier households.

Children of college-educated adults are guided through the admissions and financial aid process by parents who know the ropes, said Thomas Mortenson, senior scholar at Pell. But just as important, those children have been prepared since birth for the transition to college and what the benefits and expectations are of a degree.

“I don’t begrudge wealthy parents for the efforts they have made on behalf of their kids, but they don’t see poverty,” Mr. Mortenson said. “Literally — they don’t see it. They don’t touch it.

“Seventy-five percent of wealthy kids are going to have a bachelor’s degree by age 24, but among poor kids, it’s something like 8, 9 or 10 percent,” he said.

Michele Lagnese, an adviser at the University of Pittsburgh who works with low-income and first-generation students, said something as simple as not knowing which forms must be signed can derail a student who can’t simply call home for answers.

She recalled one student who briefly was barred from course registration because he owed thousands of dollars. As it turned out, he hadn’t signed a promissory note for loans awarded months earlier, meaning he had not formally accepted the aid.

“I brought him into the office, we went through the whole thing [and] he ended up owing something like $6,” she said.

Things don’t always end so favorably. “Sometimes, they just give up,” she said.

The federally funded TRIO student support services program at Pitt, one of many on college campuses, enables first-generation, low-income and disabled students to get intensive academic counseling and life coaching.

Getting them involved in campus social life is also key. “If they are engaged up front, we have a better chance of retaining them,” said Gannon University provost Carolynn Masters.

Nationwide, a variety of campuses are going to great lengths to show new-arriving, first-generation students that they are not alone, using grants from government, foundations and other sources.

At University of Detroit Mercy, students, professors and even the school’s provost volunteered to record videos sharing their own experiences as first-generation students, said Mary-Catherine Harrison, a faculty member coordinating the effort.

It is part of an initiative dubbed “I’m First,” which includes on its website video messages from first-generation students nationwide.

Mr. Williams, who began at Penn State Behrend and later transferred to the University Park main campus, said as time went on “it just became more and more tiring and stressful trying to be something I wasn’t.”

He can thank in part a $40,000 Promise Scholarship for college and an earlier award from the World Affairs Council of Pittsburgh that let him, while attending Pittsburgh CAPA 6-12, travel with other U.S. high school students to Italy. It was his first trip abroad.

“It changed my life,” said Mr. Williams, who has seen both his parents lose jobs. “It showed me there was more to this world than seeing my parents struggle to pay a bill.”

Other first-generation students point to clergy or high school teachers, like the English instructor at then-Westinghouse High School who paid from her own pocket so students like Vanessa Thompson could go to museums or plays.

Ms. Thompson, 24, of Lincoln, who graduated in 2012 from Chatham University with a psychology degree, considered leaving school her first semester, but her mother laid that to rest quickly over the phone. “She said, ‘No you’re not. You don’t have choice but to make it,’ ’’ said Ms. Thompson, another Promise recipient.

Carnegie Mellon University’s May graduates included Juan Acosta, 23, who might never have left Miami but for high school teachers who he said inspired him and a counselor who told him something he’d never imagined: Elite universities sometimes fly in gifted prospects for free to sample campus and the city.

It was a game-changer for Mr. Acosta, now the first degree-holder in his family. He graduated from CMU with university honors and a 3.8 GPA, having majored in global studies and Hispanic studies.

“Coming here and doing what I’ve done over the last four years was my dream.” he said. “I’m hoping to be able to pass on that same type of confidence and ability to my family and beyond.”

Bill Schackner: bschackner@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1977. Twitter: @BschacknerPG.

First Published: September 9, 2015, 4:00 a.m.