This book is an in-depth study which examines the lives of fifty ambitious Latino/a high school seniors in the San Francisco East Bay Area, following their entrance into college and career pathways over several years. This book examines the social forces that contributed to near-universal college attendance among these mostly low-income Latinos/as, all of whom attended fairly typical public schools. In an era of increased economic insecurity, decreased funding for schools, and rising college tuition, this book provides a balanced look at the individual choices and systemic constraints influencing today’s “college-for-all” orientation, while pointing the way toward possibilities for making college pathways smoother for all.

Despite their numbers, Latinos continue to lack full and equal participation in all facets of American life, including education. This book provides a critical discussion of the role that select K–12 educational policies have and continue to play in failing Latino students. The author draws upon institutional, national, and statewide data sets, as well as interviews among students, teachers, and college administrators, to explore the role that public policies play in educating Latino students. The book concludes with specific recommendations that aim to raise achievement, college transition rates, and success among Latino students across the preschool through college continuum. Chapters cover high dropout rates, access to college-preparation resources, testing and accountability, financial aid, the Dream Act, and affirmative action.

Now the largest and fastest-growing ethnic population in the U.S., Latino students face many challenges and complexities when it comes to college choice and access. This edited volume provides much needed theoretical and empirical data on how the schooling experiences of Latino students shape their educational aspirations and access to higher education. It explores how the individual and collective influence of the home, school and policy shape the college decision-making process. This unique collection of original scholarly articles offers critical insight on educational pathways that will help families, educators and policy makers intervene in ways that foster and sustain college access and participation for Latino students. It considers destination preferences and enrollment selections, elementary and secondary school experiences, and intervention programs that shed light on how practitioners can promote participation and retention. This multi-conceptual, multi-methodological volume offers directions for future research, programming and policy in Latino education.

Though colleges and universities are arguably paying more attention to diversity and inclusion than ever before, to what extent do their efforts result in more socially just campuses? This book examines how race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, sexual orientation, age, disability, nationality, and other identities connect to produce intersected campus experiences.

Megan M. Holland examines how high schools structure different pathways that lead to very different college destinations based on race and class. She finds that racial and class inequalities are reproduced through unequal access to key sources of information, even among students in the same school and even in schools with well-established college-going cultures.

Responding to the signs of the time, this book brings the lens of Catholic social thought (CST) to the enterprise of Catholic higher education in the United States. Scandals in the Church and the growth of religious non-affiliation in the culture have made being Catholic greatly challenging for Catholic colleges and universities, at the same time that the economics of higher education have mounted a challenge to the very viability of many institutions. This book throws light on what Catholic colleges and universities might and must do in order both to preserve their mission and renew it for the future. CST is concerned with the right ordering of social institutions, or in other words the systems in which individuals live and work. CST is accordingly relevant not only to the internal dynamics and structures of Catholic colleges and universities, but to the system of U.S. higher education in which individual colleges and universities operate. This edited volume, consisting of high-quality chapters by authors with disciplinary expertise, deploys the resources of CST to shed light on both internal and external challenges to, opportunities for, and obligations on institutions of Catholic higher education in the U.S. context.

Why is college completion so closely linked to social class? In The Journey Before Us, Laura Nichols looks at the experiences of aspiring first-generation college students from middle-school to young adulthood and shows what must change in order to improve college pathways and graduate more students.