The number of college and university mergers is currently surging in the U.S., largely driven by a neoliberal desire to boost economic efficiency in the face of changing demographics and declining public funding. At the same time, the number of first-generation college students is growing, but scholarly research has yet to explore how mergers impact these students. I address this gap with a case study of the New England State University (NESU) merger. Through interviews with first-generation students and support staff along with observations of orientation events, I examine how first-generation students access support services as well as how staff members provide them within the context of NESU’s post-merger organizational environment. My findings suggest that, while some post-merger policies and practices have made support services more accessible, many others have created barriers. Specifically, I find that both student and staff participants perceive NESU’s use of neoliberal reforms, including a shift to online learning and cuts to staff, programs, and resources, as making it harder for them to respectively access and provide support services. I argue that these neoliberal reforms have hollowed NESU’s capacity to support first-generation students and therefore diminished these students’ opportunity to learn, directly contradicting NESU’s espoused institutional goal of broad educational access. My study highlights how mergers can perpetuate both neoliberal reform ideals and the harm these ideals inflict on underserved students, as well as how the negative impacts on faculty and staff observed by prior merger studies can trickle down to students.