"First-in-family students encounter additional issues like a lack of preparedness for uni, financial issues and no one that's come before them to seek advice or support from," she said.

"That's a significant disadvantage."

Over 100 students, policy makers and education providers met to discuss how to support first-in-family students at the Breaking the Barriers conference held at UoW last Thursday.

While universities are successful at attracting first-in-family students - with more then 50 per cent of tertiary education students the first in their family to attend university - more needs to be done to keep them there.

"Internationally research in the UK and US indicated clearly that first-in-family students do less well in terms of higher education success," Dr O'Shea said.

She said US studies had shown 46 per cent leave university prior to completing their degree.

Dr O Shea would like first-in-family students recognised and targeted for additional support to complete their studies.

"The reason we focused on this cohort is because they're not recognised yet they often experience multiple disadvantages."

Second-year UoW student Mitchell Fenner said he ticked multiple boxes of disadvantage as a rural, low socio-economic, first-in-family student.

"I moved 500 kilometres to go to uni, you just have to look at the spatial inequity in the country, we don't have the money or the resources cities have," he said

"Just look at our grades, for example maths is taught differently in the country to what I've experienced here and even those who have high grades might be struggling being away from home."

First-in-family students often don't have crucial social connections useful for securing job opportunities and advice.

"My parents and their friends come from working in trades and in warehouses which isn't great when I wanted to break into engineering, I didn't meet my first engineer until I was 19," he said.

Dr O'Shea's Office of Learning and Teaching Project found outreach programs helped in identifying and educating families of first generation university students, which was the key to keeping them enrolled.

"We need to give students "just in time" information and we found that while there was a high level of support from families, we needed to engage with those families on how to provide the best kind of support," she said.

Website for the project, www.firstinfamily.com.au is free and available to all students and families.