At a time when college enrollment rates for low income and under-represented students are far below those of non-minority students, policies and practices designed to increase access should be a priority for colleges, universities, high schools, and community agencies. Increasing Access to College examines pre-college enrichment programs that offer a specific and immediate remedy.

Despite decades of substantial investments by the federal government, state governments, colleges and universities, and private foundations, students from low-income families as well as racial and ethnic minority groups continue to have substantially lower levels of postsecondary educational attainment than individuals from other groups. The State of College Access and Completion draws together leading researchers nationwide to summarize the state of college access and success and to provide recommendations for how institutional leaders and policymakers can effectively improve the entire spectrum of college access and completion. Springboarding from a seminar series organized by the Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance, chapter authors explore what is known and not known from existing research about how to improve student success. This much-needed book calls explicit attention to the state of college access and success not only for traditional college-age students, but also for the substantial and growing number of "nontraditional" students. Describing trends in various outcomes along the pathway from college access to completion, this volume documents persisting gaps in outcomes based on students’ demographic characteristics and offers recommendations for strategies to raise student attainment. Graduate students, scholars, and researchers in higher education will find The State of College Access and Completion to be an important and timely resource.

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" "Rewarding Strivers" presents provocative research and analysis that provides a blueprint for the way forward."--William R. Fitzsimmons, Dean of Admissions, Harvard University "The terrible 'secret' of higher education in America is that too few students from poorer families have access to it.... Kahlenberg again gathers the best thinkers on how to challenge this status quo."--Anthony Marx, President, Amherst College Today, higher education is a major force in promoting social mobility, yet colleges and universities seem more concerned with prestige than finding ways to make higher learning more accessible. Rewarding Strivers outlines two high-profile models that colleges and universities can follow in making the American Dream a realistic one for all students. Former New York Times education writer Edward B. Fiske (author of The Fiske Guide to Colleges) explores an exciting new effort to provide extra financial aid and academic support to low-income students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He finds that the "Carolina Covenant" has much to teach public and private universities across the country. In order to benefit from financial aid and support, low-income students first must be admitted to college. In a chapter that is likely to prove highly controversial, Georgetown University's Anthony Carnevale and Jeff Strohl articulate a coherent and concrete way for colleges and universities to provide a leg up to economically disadvantaged students in selective college admissions. The authors make an important contribution to the nation's raging debate over affirmative action by calling on universities to expand preferences beyond race to also include socioeconomic status, and outlining how such a program could work in practice.

Faced with continuing racial and social stratification, higher education institutions seek ways to increase access to the postsecondary education environment for increasingly diverse student populations in the United States. Attention to the preparation of students for college, changes in policies addressing financial aid and the K-20 schooling environment, and movement away from comprehensive models of college choice are characteristics of recent research examining the ways students from different backgrounds determine whether or where to go to college. This volume explores the nuances of the college choice process, focusing specifically on the experiences of students of color and students from lower socieconomic backgrounds, summarizing the extensive body of literature that shapes practice, policy, and research around college choice. This is the fourth issue in the 35th volume of the Jossey-Bass series ASHE Higher Education Report. Each monograph in the series is the definitive analysis of a tough higher education problem, based on thorough research of pertinent literature and institutional experiences. Topics are identified by a national survey. Noted practitioners and scholars are then commissioned to write the reports, with experts providing critical reviews of each manuscript before publication.

Also known as “free tuition” and “free college” programs, college promise programs are an emerging approach for increasing higher education attainment of people in particular places. To maximize the effectiveness of their efforts and investments, program leaders and policymakers need research-based evidence to inform program design, implementation, and evaluation. With the goal of addressing this knowledge need, this volume presents a collection of research studies that examine several categories and variations of college promise programs. These theoretically grounded empirical investigations use varied data sources and analytic techniques to examine the effects of college promise programs that have different design features and operate in different places. Individually and collectively, the results of these studies have implications for the design and implementation of promise programs if these programs are to create meaningful improvements in attainment for people from underserved groups. The authors’ efforts also provide a useful foundation for the next generation of college promise research.

Beyond Free College outlines an audacious national agenda—consistent with, but far more comprehensive than, the current “free college” movement—that builds on the best of US higher education’s populist history such as the G.I. Bill and the community college transfer function. The authors align a wide constellation of higher education trends—online learning, prior learning assessment, competency-based learning, high school college-credit— with a rapidly shifting student transfer environment that privileges college credit as the pivotal educational catalyst to boost access and completion. The book’s agenda seeks greater productive investment in postsecondary education by privileging a single metric—lower-cost-per-degree-granted—as the animating driver of a transfer pathway that will fulfill the potential of its historical, progressive innovators. Beyond Free College’s goal is as simple as it is urgent: To galvanize higher education advocates in an effort to reorganize, reorient, and reignite the transfer function to serve the needs of a neotraditional student population that now constitutes the majority of college-goers in America; and in ways that advance completion, not just access to higher education.