A Hidden Curriculum Restricts Student Success

Academia is structured on a false assumption: that all students arrive at institutions with the same cultural knowledge.

By Michelle Arauz

The first email I ever sent to a college professor began with “Mr.” and I did not know, at the time, that this was wrong. No one had told me, because no one in my immediate family had ever earned a PhD. Neither my mother nor my father had gone to college. 

When I walked onto campus as a first-generation student, I carried none of the unspoken knowledge that peers had absorbed: how to address a professor, how to visit office hours without feeling like an imposter, or how to decode the difference between what a syllabus says and what the professor actually means. My classmates moved through the institution as though they had been handed a map. A map I did not know existed. 

That map has a name: the hidden curriculum. The concept originated with Philip Jackson in 1968, in his book Life in the Classroom. The term “hidden curriculum” refers to the conscious and unconscious norms, values, and behaviors of learning to navigate an educational system. It is everything a student would learn, whether inside or outside the classroom, that never appears on a syllabus or slideshow. It encompasses the unsaid, unspoken, and unwritten norms and values of academia: how to speak to important figures, how to advocate for yourself, and how to show everyone that you belong. 

The problem is that not all students arrive knowing how to navigate the hidden curriculum. For first-generation college students, many of whom come from lower-income backgrounds, or students whose families had little prior access to higher education, learning these unwritten rules is a steep and largely invisible climb. While their peers navigate campus with inherited ease, these students spend enormous energy decoding an environment that was never designed with them in mind. The hidden curriculum does not just shape the college experience; instead, for many, it determines whether they make it through at all.  

The hidden curriculum in higher education is not a neutral force; instead, it is a barrier. While universities pride themselves on being spaces of equal opportunity, many operate on the assumption that all students arrive with the same foundational social and institutional knowledge. For many students, this is not their reality. That distinction has profound consequences for who succeeds, who struggles, and who is ultimately pushed out. 

In order to understand how the hidden curriculum harms those who lack inherited knowledge, it is important to understand for whom universities were built. Elite higher education in America was not designed with first-generation or low-income students in mind. A study by Raj Chetty, John N. Friedman, and David J. Deming of Opportunity Insights (2023) found that America’s elite colleges continue to pass down wealth and opportunity across generations. These institutions have long operated as next-steps for the already privileged, where legacy preferences, private school pipelines, and recruited athletic spots serve as a side door for the wealthy. 

An economist at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Susan Dynarski, told the New York Times: “The Ivy League doesn’t have low-income students because it doesn’t want low-income students.” When the architecture of a university is built around students who already know the rules, those who were never taught them are not only behind but in a different game entirely. 

The hidden curriculum in higher education functions as a silent gatekeeper, one that systematically disadvantages first-generation, low-income, and historically excluded students by rewarding inherited institutional knowledge over academic merit. Until universities make the unspoken spoken, equity in higher education will remain out of reach. 

Minerva Orellana, a first-generation American and acting assistant professor at the University of Washington, knows the weight of the hidden curriculum firsthand. Having completed her PhD at Mayo Clinic, Orellana co-authored a landmark study, published in 2021, with mentor Dr. Felicity Enders that examined how doctoral trainees from diverse backgrounds experience and navigate the hidden curriculum in healthcare academia. 

The study surveyed 22 doctoral trainees within the Mayo Clinic’s Clinical and Translational Science predoctoral training program, asking them to rate the relative importance of hidden curriculum topics for both majority and diverse trainees. Participants identified significant gaps, particularly around assertive communication confidence and coping with bias. Areas where diverse trainees needed considerably more support than the majority of their peers. 

“The higher I go up in academia, the more there is a hidden curriculum,” Orellana reflects. Noting that as a Latina and first-generation student, navigating these unspoken norms had always been a deeply personal experience for her. 

The study’s findings reveal something that many first-generation and low-income students already feel but rarely see named: the hidden curriculum is not a neutral obstacle. Instead, it is something that hits hardest for those already in the minority and margins. Students from the majority of backgrounds arrive with acquired familiarity with how academia works. First-generation and minoritized students are left to decode a system that was never designed with them in mind. For these students, the challenge is not the harder rules, but the invisible ones. They must navigate spaces where no one from their family has ever walked before, in buildings that were not designed with them in mind. 

As Orellana puts it, “You don’t know what you don’t know”, and for students without a family map to guide them, that gap can quietly determine their future. 

Gnerado Ramirez, a professor of Educational Psychology at Ball State University, conducted a study published in 2026 investigating the effectiveness of resource-based and narrative-based interventions in surfacing the hidden curriculum for first-year students at a minority-serving institution. Working with 716 first-year students at California State University, Los Angeles, Ramirez and his colleagues randomly assigned students to one of two intervention conditions. One was a resource-based approach that explicitly explained campus norms and tools, and the other was a combined approach that paired those resources with unscripted peer narrative, and then compared both against a no-treatment group.

Ramirez came to study the hidden curriculum not from a distance, but from lived experience. As a first-generation college student himself, Ramirez remembers feeling frustrated and embarrassed by the things he did not know, many of which seemed like common sense to everyone around him. 

“There were things I did not know, and I did not want to look incompetent, staying up at night trying to figure something out,” Ramirez said. What other students seemed to already understand, he remained awake at late hours of the night trying to figure out, which is exactly what drove his research. 

The results were striking because students in both intervention groups earned significantly higher GPAs in the fall semester compared to the no-treatment group. These results suggest that simply telling students what the instructions and guidelines are, something no one had ever taken the time to explain, was enough to make a difference. 

Ramirez says, “Students really just need to know a little bit of information about how to be successful, enough to make a difference.” Ramirez’s statement points to something both hopeful and sentencing. If a short intervention can produce measurable academic gain, then the harm caused by withholding that information is not impossible. This was a choice, a choice made by institutions that assumed all students arrived already knowing what they needed to know. 

Some will argue that universities have made significant strides in recent years to close these gaps. Whether that be pointing first-generation students to centers, mentorship programs, and financial aid expansions. They are not wrong that progress has been made, but acknowledging that a problem exists is not the same as dismantling the structures that created it. 

Orientation programs that mention office hours once do not undo eighteen years of knowing that office hours existed. A financial aid package does not teach a student how to email a professor or use the correct honorifics, navigate an academic advisor, or advocate for themselves in a system that was never built with them in mind, as long as the hidden curriculum remains hidden, whether passed down informally to those who already have access and withheld from those who do not. These interventions will remain band-aids on a wound that runs far deeper than any single program can reach. 

The hidden curriculum is neither a myth nor a minor inconvenience; instead, it is a system. A system that quietly sorts students not by their intelligence level or their drive, but by what they were lucky enough to inherit at birth. I know this because I lived it. I was the student who typed “Mr.” into an email and did not understand why it mattered. I was the student who watched my peers move through campus with a confidence I could not name or replicate. This was because it was not confidence, it was a map, one I had never been given. 

The moment institutions choose to make the unspoken spoken, to stop assuming that all students arrive with the same inherited knowledge, is the moment higher education begins to live up to the promise it has always made. Equal opportunity should not depend on whether your parents went to college, on what you already knew before you walked through the door, and it should never depend on a map that only some students were handed.