CSUN: COLLEGE OF EDUCATION: ELPS 601

by Janice L. Bloom — 2007

While college is perceived as a given for many middle- and upper-income students graduating from high school, the transition from secondary to higher education is a much more complicated one for low-income students, particularly poor and working-class students of color. This article focuses on the critical juncture—one that is under-explored in both the literature on secondary schools and higher education—that these students arrive at when they graduate from high school, and their decision-making processes about whether or not to attend college. What are students worried about? Who are they receiving help from? What do they already know and not know about colleges and the differences between them? How are they making choices about where to apply, and then where to go? What stumbling blocks do they encounter, what are their doubts and fears? Drawing on research conducted at three small urban public schools over the course of a year, this article offers an important lens on the ways that social class shapes students' developmental experiences and choices, paving some roads and obstructing easy access down others.

INTRODUCTION

The scene: A 12th-grade college prep class at a small public school in New York City. The class of 15 students is exclusively African American and Latino, and from low-income households.

It is May, and a college representative has been invited in to the class to give a lesson on "budgeting" —presumably on the assumption that this is something that students don't yet know about, but will need to now that they're graduating from high school.

The college representative hands out a budget sheet to each of the students. He returns to the front of the room, straightens his tie and clears his throat. "Now, how much do you think the average person makes in their first year out of college?"

"Mad money," calls out one student.

"To me, I would assume that was like $100,000. You probably won't be making that much right out of college."

"Thirty to forty thousand," calls out another student.

"That's probably about right—assume it's about forty thousand. So, fill in that figure on your sheet. Then go through and fill out the chart of fixed monthly and annual expenses: rent, utilities, food, telephone, car payments, car insurance, transportation."

I walk around the room as students quietly fill out the charts. Their figures for rent: $300, $500, $100. Many are quite aware of their family's monthly rent, though probably not of how incredibly low these figures are in New York City, one of the most expensive cities in the country. On many of the other blanks, they are stumped. Finally, Juan asks, "How much is rent? What if you live in the projects?"

"Assume you don't live in the projects—that you live in regular housing, no Section-8 or anything like that," the representative answers.

"Can you buy a used car?" counters Juan.

"Assume for this that you're buying a new car."

"How much are utilities?" Irie puzzles. "We don't pay utilities; in the projects, sometimes you pay one, or the other, or neither—that's just how it works."

"Assume you're paying about $80 a month for utilities," responds the representative, with growing frustration. Why, he seems to be wondering, are these students so unable to come up with the answers he was expecting? And what is he supposed to do with their questions?

In the corner, Isabella mutters, "I'd have Section-8, candles, and go to the Salvation Army for clothes."

What she means is: I cannot assume.

For these students—as for many others that I worked with and followed during a two-year research project from 2002-2004—the issues that they face as they complete high school and make choices about their future are not the ones that the representative's scenario had been prepared for. It is not that they don't want to earn $40,000 a year, buy a new car, and be able to move away from the projects. However, having grown up poor, Isabella, Juan, and Irie are deeply aware of the ways that they cannot assume the "average" life of which the representative so blithely speaks; and they understand, in ways that he does not, the risks that they must take in order to reach for the middle-class world he describes.

It is these risks, the things that low-income students cannot "assume"—and what they reflect about how issues and experiences of social class shape youth development—that I explore in this article. In particular, I focus on the critical juncture that these students arrive at when they graduate from high school, and their decision-making processes about whether or not to attend college. This moment in these young peoples' lives—as they stand at the door of adulthood, gauging its opportunities and hazards, reading the world and the possibilities it holds for them—offers an important lens on the ways that social class shapes students' developmental experiences and choices, paving some roads and obstructing easy access down others.

In their senior year of high school, as they make their way through the college application process: What are students worried about? Who are they receiving help from? What do they already know and not know about colleges and the differences between them? How are they making choices about where to apply, and then where to go? What stumbling blocks do blthey encounter, what are their doubts and fears? And, traveling with them through to the following September: Where do they end up, and why?

I examine this move from high school to higher education through ethnographic research that follows students—based at three different high schools in New York City—across the arc of this crucial year. In doing so, I hope to make a contribution to existing literature in two ways. While a wealth of existing high school-to-college literature has studied this transition, it has tended to look wide rather than deep (i.e., through surveys or single interviews with many students) and to focus on programmatic solutions rather than seeking to unravel complicated causes. Through ethnography, I hope to fill in the details of a picture that has until now been sketched only in outline.

And as these details became clearer, they pushed me to want to challenge some of the constructs that have been used to explain the often less-than-positive outcomes of this transition for low-income students, and to question the portrayal of poor and working-class students' decision-making processes at this juncture. While scholars have puzzled over "contradictory attitudes towards education" exhibited by low-income students both white (Weis, 1990), Latino, and African-American (Hochschild, 1995), and have struggled to explain the "oppositional identity" particularly of African-American students (Ogbu, 1989; Ogbu, 1990), I believe that too often, the aspirations and motivations of these students and their families and communities are misread—by both academics and educators—as they struggle to figure out whether or how to attend college.

A more critical reading of the risks that social-class positioning exposes poor and working-class students to shows their hesitations, contradictions, and decisions in a very different light. By connecting the "micro" of their daily lives with the "macro" of financial-aid policies, existing portrayals of higher education, and social access to experiences of college in previous generations, I argue that decisions that these students make need to be judged from the shoes in which they stand, with the deepest possible understanding of what it's like to "live the specificities of a classed location at a particular time and place" (Walkerdine, Lucey & Melody, 2001). Walkerdine et al. also say that rather than holding up the uniformity of educational achievement among middle- and upper-class students as the only rational outcome/choice, it is important to explore the enduring importance of class in explaining the educational trajectories and life chances of poor and working-class youth.

This understanding is crucial in a range of arenas: to work in educational sociology and the sociology of class; to policy-makers attempting to solve problems in secondary and higher education; and to educators working directly with students in both areas. Without it, we fail to comprehend an important force in the development of these young people.

(MIS)READING SOCIAL CLASS

In my past experience, as a teacher of mostly poor and working-class eleventh- and twelfth-grade students, I must admit to my own lack of understanding about the forces acting upon my students. In this, I believe, I was not alone. For members of the middle class—teachers and educators among them—the educational choices of poor and working-class students often appear puzzling.

The reasons for going to college seemed so compelling, from where I stood. The economics seemed to speak for themselves: while the median annual household income of a high-school graduate is slightly above $35,000 per year, with a bachelor's degree, median household income reaches above $60,000 (U.S. Census Bureau, 2001). As Gladieux (2004) notes, "There are no guarantees in life, with or without a college diploma . . . but the odds are increasingly stacked against those with the least education and training . . . the decision to attend college, and often which particular college and course of study, determines more than ever who has entrée to the best jobs and life chances" (p. 18).

When students chose not to go to college, then, it was hard not to somehow conclude that students simply must not understand the consequences of their choices and actions. How could they understand the benefits they would reap by going to college, and choose not to? Perhaps if we could explain more clearly, to young people and their families, my colleagues and I thought again and again—they would make different decisions. Aronowitz (2000) notes a ". . . commonly held, largely middle-class assumption that ‘making it'…is reasonable and those who fail to measure up may be judged irrational or simply incapable of learning what they need to know" (p. 6).

As a researcher, I have had the chance to step back and ask: what, in fact, do poor and working-class students know and understand about the economics of getting a college education? Is it the case that they are confused, unclear, acting in contradictory ways, and that a "rational" course is represented by middle-class students whose articulated goals and outcomes are more in line?

In important ways, much of current academic literature seems to support this view of low-income students and families. Schneider and Stevenson (1999) explore the "ambition paradox" of college choices among low-income youth, and conclude that these young people's educational paths are often the result of "misaligned ambitions," due to lack of information and unrealistic expectations. In her mid-1980s study of white working-class high school students in upstate New York, Weis (1990) characterizes these students' relationship with schooling as "contradictory," and argues that this contradictory relationship is even more exaggerated among poor blacks (p. 37).

And in several articles, John Ogbu makes the (by now familiar) argument for an "oppositional culture" which explains educational outcomes for low-income students of color. He argues that, "Oppositional identity plays a major role in the attitudes of the community, parents, and students toward school because they see the school as a white institution . . . conforming to school requirements means ‘acting white' and giving up one's minority identity. . . . All of these attitudes and behaviors lead inevitably to poor academic performance" (Ogbu & Simons, 1998, p. 178–9).

The findings from my research, however, point to a different explanation for the educational choices of poor and working-class youth—one that is intimately tied to social class and its effects on young people's development. Like Mickelson (1990), I found that while students expressed an "abstract" belief, based on the dominant American ideology, that through education, everyone has access to "making it" in America, they also often acted on more "concrete" beliefs—"accurate assessments of the returns that their education is likely to bring them as they make the transition to adulthood" (p. 45).

With very few exceptions, the group of high-school seniors that I followed through their college-application process—all of who were qualified to attend college, as demonstrated through their acceptance rates—began the year declaring that they wanted and planned to go to college. Their journey towards that goal, however, covered very different terrain based on their backgrounds and financial resources. Like Mickelson, my research reveals that students in fact make extremely accurate assessments of the choices the world is offering to them, and the risks that they face in their transition to adulthood: but that these choices and risks are very different for different groups of students based on their social-class location. Most strikingly, poor and working-class students face significant economic, social, and psychological risks that middle- and upper-class students do not.

THE RESEARCH STUDY

From 2002–2004, I followed the journey of a group of high-school seniors in three small urban high schools as they made their plans for life after graduation.1 This time of transition and choices about the future is under-explored in both the literature on secondary schools and higher education; yet it seemed like a crucial one in understanding why high-school students do or do not go on to college, and how they arrive at particular institutions if they do. While the outcomes of this process—in terms of college attendance in the fall for students who undertook the college-application process the previous year—are more likely to be predictable for middle- and upper-income students, this is often not the case for low-income students.

Because the study was conceived as a multi-sited ethnography (Marcus, 1998), I spent a year at each school doing participant observation in a college prep class or an "advisory" class where students were focusing on applying to college. I attended this class at least once a week from September to June, listening and taking notes as well as helping individual students fill out college applications or financial aid forms; occasionally, I would teach a whole-group lesson, or lead a conversation with the students (Bosk, 1989).

I also followed a small group of students much more closely (two at one school, four at another, six at the third, in rough proportion to the size of the school's senior class), conducting focus groups and individual interviews with them on an ongoing basis over the course of the year and through the summer. In order to get a fuller picture of the process these students were going through, I interviewed their parents or a significant adult in their lives; and I interviewed teachers, college counselors, and the principals of each of the schools. Finally, I administered two surveys to a larger cohort of seniors at each of the schools (one in December, one in June),2 making it possible to see how common or unique individual students' experiences and perspectives were within the context of the school as a whole. Throughout the study, I used the extended case method (Burawoy, Burton, Ferguson, Fox, Gamson, Gartrell, Hurst, Kurzman, Salzinger, Schiffman, & Ui, 1991) to analyze the effects of the "macro" of financial aid policies, media portrayals of college, and social access to information about higher education on the "micro" of students' daily lives.

Two of the schools in which my research was conducted—Vista Academy and Connections High—have student bodies that are overwhelmingly African American and Latino and low-income. At both schools, more than 80% of students qualify for free lunch, and over 90% of students are African American or Latino. At the third school—Tower High School3—there is a greater (and, unusual for New York City) racial and economic balance: in 2003–4, 36% of students qualified for free lunch, and the student body was 45% white, 18% African American, 28% Latino, and 9% Asian/other.4

These three high schools are unique in several important ways. As members of the Coalition of Essential Schools, they are part of an educational reform movement advocating for small high schools with a twenty-five year history in New York City. Vista and Connections both have enrollments of less than 300; while considerably larger at just over a thousand students, Tower is still considerably smaller than most New York City high schools. None of these schools track their students—all students are assumed to be "college-bound" and thus receive a college-prep curriculum. At all three schools, close to 100% of the 2003 and 2004 graduating cohorts of students applied to college. These college-application rates are particularly noteworthy given research on socioeconomic status and the likelihood of students filling out college applications.5

These schools, then, represent tremendous success in moving poor and working-class urban youth of color towards college.6And yet, my own experiences as a teacher and my conversations with teachers at these schools alerted me to a phenomenon that was not documented anywhere:7 though over 90% of students were accepted to college and said in June that they planned to go, when we bumped into them on the street, we discovered that many of them did not in fact enroll for the first day of classes in September. What, I wondered, was happening over the summer? What, perhaps, was happening over the course of their senior year and college-application process that teachers and advisors had failed to notice?

Connections High, Vista Academy, and Tower High School offered a unique opportunity for this inquiry. With their commitment to untracking, their emphasis on preparing all students for college, and improved educational outcomes for low-income students of color, these schools have removed many of the institutional barriers that account for low student achievement in many other urban and suburban school systems (Knight, Norton, Bentley, & Dixon, 2003; Knight, 2004; Nieto, 1992; Oakes, 1985). What my research revealed was that, despite these impressive reforms, formidable roadblocks still lay on students' paths towards college.

FINANCIAL RISKS: FROM MICRO TO MACRO

Nationwide data confirms a consensus among young people on the financial imperative to go to college: fully 95% of current high-school students say, when asked, that they want to go on to higher education (Adelman, 2002; Rosenbaum, 2001). However, unlike their middle-class peers, poor and working-class students cannot take the word of their college counselor (who most likely is also middle class) that, "they should just apply, don't worry about the money now."8 Paulsen and St. John (2002) note that, "Students have dramatically different choice contexts, which have a pervasive influence on multiple stages of the sequences of student choices" (p. 194).

For many middle-class students, the college-application process is one of self-exploration. What do they like to do? Which part of the country would they feel comfortable in? What kind of campus or study body appeals to them, which school has the nicest dorms or library or playing fields? In a survey in a largely middle- and upper-class suburban school in the spring,9 when asked about their worries about starting college in the fall, seniors' answers included "laundry" and "making friends." At Tower High School, in answer to the question, "Is there anything that you worry might get in the way of your plans for next year? If so, what might those things be?" a majority of middle-class students wrote "no", "n/a", a question mark, or left the question blank10 Answers from poor and working-class students at Vista, Connections and Tower looked very different. Over and over again, they wrote, "Money, finances." "Money." "Money."

By following students throughout the year, the complexity of their one-word answer was revealed. "Money" was an issue for these students on many levels, at many different points in their consideration of college. Their lived economic realities, as well as their reading of the socioeconomic terrain that they were about to enter, came into play in their decision-making in ways both large and small.

A Dollar for Lunch

At a most fundamental level, I watched students grapple with the micro-economics of day-to-day survival. Many of the costs of college are invisible to middle-class adults or young people because they do not live on a tight budget. For poor students, however, the cost of transportation to school, books, and food loom large in trying to imagine themselves on a college campus.

One Connections High student, arriving late to meet a group that was traveling to visit a school in New Jersey, called to explain that she was back at Penn Station. What should she do?

"Take the subway to school (i.e., Connections High), Jasnery. You're going to have to go to classes today since you missed the trip," the accompanying teacher answered.

"I can't," Jasnery replied. "I don't have any money to take the train. I'll have to call my brother to come get me."

A month later, I saw her eating her lunch, which consisted of a small bag of pretzels and a four-ounce container of colored water, and asked if she was on a diet.

"No, I'm not on a diet. But I only have a dollar for lunch," she explained.

Having arrived at college, Jasmine, another Connections High student, found herself in exactly the situation she had feared come Thanksgiving vacation.

"I signed up to take the charter bus to New York [from Hampton, Virginia], but then they cancelled it at the last minute. And they sent the money home to my father rather than giving it back to me! How am I supposed to get home, then? I don't have $60 for the bus! I had to wait for my father to wire it to me. . . ."

The deep financial difficulties of daily life that these students cope with often became clear in the context of my research.

"I'm not really having to pay anything now"

On a second level, students were deeply affected by the rising costs of college and trends in family income which, when put together, have hit poor students the hardest (Gladieux, 2004, p. 24). Research from the past fifteen years (St. John & Noell, 1989; Paulsen & St. John, 2002; Kane, 1999) consistently suggests that low-income students are more sensitive to tuition increases than middle- and upper-income students. "Whereas cost considerations did not play a substantial role in the college choices made by most upper-income students [which they categorize as income greater than $60,000]. . . low-income students treated cost-related factors as a major consideration in their college-choice process (Paulsen & St. John, 2002, p. 209, 207). While the astronomical price tags of private colleges mean that middle- and upper-income families increasingly do need to pay attention to cost when making college choices, money does not play as overwhelming—and defining—a role as it does for low-income families.

In large part, this is due to the different percentages of their family income made up by the cost of attending college, and the effects of falling real income on poor and working-class families. For a low-income family, the average annual bill for attending a public four-year institution represented nearly 60% of their income in 2001–2, up from 42% in 1971–2; for a high-income family, the same bill represented only 5% of their income in 2001–2, down from 6% in 1971–2 (Gladieux, 2004, p. 26).

Recent conversations with students at Tower High School reflect these different realities. In one conversation with three working-class students of color, I pressed them on the issue of how much their parents could pay for college.

Janice: But what if they say you have to pay $4,000 a year?

Evie: That's not that bad. Because I think I could get a scholarship for that.

Mark: Oh, in terms of getting a scholarship. I thought you meant like having to pay. . .

Janice: So, your parents—your parents couldn't pay $4,000?

Sara: Yeah, no.

Mark: No, I don't think so.

Evie: Maybe they would be able to. I mean, if it came down to like I have to pay or else I can't go to the college I really want to, then $4,000 is not that bad.

Two middle-class Tower students—Nigel and Aaron—also said that money was an issue for them. Their sense of how much money was a worry, however, reflected a very different situation.

Nigel: I recently actually got into Oberlin, but I'm deciding not to go. I've going to stick with SUNY Albany.

Janice: So, what made you decide? Because that was one of your top choices, from when I talked to you earlier.

Nigel: Yeah. Well, I would have had to pick up college debt, or more so. I'm not really having to pay anything now. Well, I only have to pay like $8,000 a year.

Aaron: I am worried about money. I should have enough money in my college fund for the first year, and part of the second, and then I'll be in debt.

Janice: How much does it cost?

Aaron: $27,000 a year.

While for Evie, Mark and Sara, $4,000 for a year of college seems like a huge sum, Nigel describes the $8,000-a-year SUNY tuition as "not really having to pay anything" and Aaron—with close to $40,000 in a college fund—is worried about money. Clearly, the families of both Nigel and Aaron have enough money to attend public four-year colleges—what is at issue is whether or not they can afford private colleges. With $4,000 feeling like a stretch for the families of Evie, Mark, and Sara, however, attending college at all becomes a question. Thus, while students across the economic spectrum worry about the cost of college, these worries are of a very different shape depending on students' social class location.

"I guess I'll look for scholarships, but I'm not taking out loans!"

On a third level, at the same time that college costs have been rising and real family income falling, the amount of financial aid available to low-income students to offset the costs of college has been shrinking over the past thirty years. Poor and working-class students, keenly aware of the economic landscape surrounding them, are in fact more aware of what this means on the ground than their (often middle-class) teachers and college counselors who may have attended college ten or fifteen years previously.

These changes in financial aid—a marked shift from grants to loans (Gladieux, 2004; Kahlenberg, 2004; Kane, 1999; McPherson & Shapiro, 1991; Mortenson, 1990a and b; Mumpers, 1996; Paulsen & St. John, 2002), the extension of eligibility for federal aid up the economic ladder without additional funding (thus lowering the amount of money per student) (Gladieux, 2004), the increasing use by states of merit-based scholarships rather than need-based ones, and the creation of tax credits such as educational IRAs and Lifetime Learning Tax Credits—have all come at the expense of financial help for low-income students. Gladieux notes that tax credits alone are projected to cost the U.S. Treasury $60 billion dollars in lost revenue between 2003–2007, but that almost none of that money will go to low-income students (2004, p. 34).

Not surprisingly, these new financial conditions in higher education have had different effects across social classes (Paulsen & St. John, 2002). Low-income students pursuing four-year degrees must borrow more than higher-income students, meaning that (given interest payments) they in fact pay more for the same college education. Mumpers calculates, "The student who borrows the maximum Stafford loan amount for each of his or her four years of college will have borrowed $18,000 when they graduate. When the loan is finally paid off, he or she will have repaid more than $27,000" (1996, p. 131).

At the same time, loans for higher education are a much greater risk for poor and working-class students. Many may have watched family members, friends, or neighbors take out loans, and then drop out of college and be unable to pay them back (McDonough, 1997). Research shows that students educated in inner-city schools (as their families, neighbors, and friends are most likely to have been) are more likely to be underprepared for college (Campaigne & Hossler, 1998; Kane, 1999; Mumpers, 1996), putting them at higher risk of dropping out, or needing to take remedial classes in college—increasing their loan costs and delaying their entry into the job market (Fossey, 1998). Gladieux notes, "Some of these students may be left worse off if they have borrowed to finance their studies. . . . They leave college with no degree, no skills, and a debt to repay" (2004, p. 23).

The poor and working-class students at Tower, Connections, and Vista Academy were painfully aware of this danger. Throughout the year, along with their more general worries about money, almost every student I spoke with echoed one refrain, "I'm not taking out loans"; "I don't know how I'm going to pay, but I don't want to borrow money!"; " I guess I'll look for scholarships, but I'm not taking out loans!" Though they may not know the specific history of financial-aid shifts, or the intricacies of tax credits and interest payments, their vehemence reflects the all-too-real risks they take in taking on higher-education debt.

"You're not the only one who has an education"

Finally, low-income students' assessments reflect an awareness of larger global trends in the economy, and what these trends may mean for them. Research supports that, even if these students do succeed in finishing college, it is unclear if their earnings after college will justify the money they must borrow (Freeman, 1999; Perna, 1998). Students from low-income backgrounds, on average, earn less post-college than higher-income students (Mortenson, 1990a; Mumpers, 1996); likewise, according to the most recent census data, African Americans and Latinos earn less than their white counterparts even when they hold equivalent degrees.11

And despite educational reports stressing huge increases in the number of jobs requiring a college degree (Haycock & Huang, 2001), economists' predictions about the future labor market further bear out students' worries. Lafer (2002) notes that no economist predicts that the total demand for college-educated workers will exceed 25–30% of the labor force at any point in the foreseeable future; likewise, Kern (2000) estimates that the labor market requires only 27% of workers to have 16 or more years of education, another 26% to have 8–10 years plus additional on-the-job training, and the rest to have less education. This is exactly what MacLeod finds when he re-interviews the "Brothers" several years after his original 1987 study, Ain't No Makin It: Aspirations and Attainment in a Low Income Community. "Although blacks are staying in school, their job prospect fail to show a corresponding improvement. . . [For the Brothers] a high school diploma, a bit of college, a positive attitude and a wealth of ambition do not pay off as advertised" (1995, p. 214, 237).

In one group discussion towards the end of the year, several Connections High students argued:

Even if you go to college, you're not the only one who has an education. Just because you graduated doesn't mean you've got a guaranteed job.

You're not going to start off at the top, and you're going to have loans to pay.

From the most micro to the most macro aspects, then, poor and working-class students confront a very different reality than middle-class students do. Regardless of their academic ability, low-income students face far greater financial hurdles when choosing to attend college, particularly a four-year residential college. For many, it is a risk that appears too great. Though students' abstract attitudes about higher education—and deeply held desires and dreams—are very similar across class lines, the realities on which they must base their decisions reflect very different landscapes.

SOCIAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL RISKS

Alongside the hard reality of financial risks these students must take, lie other risks—less quantifiable, and more difficult for students to articulate, but equally as real. In attempting the move to higher education, they must also face enormous social and psychological risks. They must put their self-esteem on the line, by taking the chance that they will be rejected by the world they hope to enter; they must brave subtle and not-so-subtle messages about who belongs in the world of higher education and who doesn't; they must shoulder the weight of their own, their family's, and their community's hopes and fears about moving out of poverty and into an unfamiliar middle-class orbit; and far too often, they must make this journey alone and unaided.

At Connections High and Vista Academy, the majority of students were the first generation in their family to attend college (at Tower, this was the case for many low-income students of color, but not for white and middle-class students). Though many had older siblings, cousins, or aunts and uncles who had gone or were in college, their parents had not attended, and indeed often had not finished high school. Literature on first-generation students details the many emotional and psychological challenges that they face (London, 1992; Rendon, 1992; Richardson & Skinner, 1992) upon arriving on a college campus; what my research suggests is that these issues rear their head long before that point, most concretely at the moment when students begin the college-application process.

These students' lack of easy access to information about higher education and the application process plays an important role in the challenges they face. Many middle-class students are surrounded by this information, without even being aware of it: parents' conversations about their alma maters and college days, family friends who apply a few years ahead of them, the names of top colleges that are a part of every day conversations among their peers. This cultural and social capital (Bourdieu, 1986; Coleman, 1988) —or lack thereof—is an important element in understanding students' journey towards college. But beyond the difficulties this creates in actually navigating the application process for poor and working-class students, the fact that the world of higher education is unfamiliar territory—that they are traveling to a foreign country rather than to the next state over—plays an important role in the anxieties involved in this process. While many middle-class students receive the message from early on that they are destined to go on to higher education (Walkerdine, Lucey & Melody, 2001) and feel a sense of entitlement to that destiny (McDonough, 1997; Lareau, 2003), low-income/first-generation students are trying on a college-going identity as they take part in the application process. Thus, they must confront deep psychological fears and doubts in making this shift: Are they prepared? Will they be able to fit in? Who can help them if they falter? And what will failure mean about them and to their families and communities?

"I just thought that's what college was, preppy – that there wasn't anywhere that wasn't J. Crew"

In Choosing Colleges, McDonough argues that students believe they are entitled to a particular kind of collegiate education based on their family's habitus or class status, because they perceive their choices by scanning the environment around them (1997, p. 9); students read these powerful "concrete" messages at the same time that they want and hope to believe "abstract" declarations that anyone can go to any college, if they work hard enough.

As students try on this new identity, they are scrutinizing themselves and this new uniform in the mirror. Does it fit them? Do they fit it? As astute readers of the social and economic landscape around them, students have not missed the images on television and in movies of what a college campus looks like—expanses of green, quiet, columned halls—and who is there. They have not missed the fact that there are not a lot of students like themselves. Laura, one of the Vista students, reflected back on her sense of college in eleventh grade when she first began thinking about it: "I just thought that's what college was, preppy—that there wasn't anywhere that wasn't J. Crew."

Various points in the college-application process reinforced their doubts. Seemingly benign—if frustrating—bureaucratic forms carried messages that were invisible to (my own) middle-class eyes, but that spoke loudly to these young people. The long list of questions included: What year and make is your car? Mortgage information? Net worth of your parents' investments? Of tax-deferred pension plans?

What does it mean if your family doesn't have any of these things?

And what does it mean if the form doesn't seem to even be talking about you? For those who live with grandparents, aunts and uncles, or other extended family members, because their parents have died or are in prison—not a small number of these students—their families were defined right out of existence.

Page seven of the FAFSA form reads as follows:

Read these notes to determine who is considered a parent on this form. Answer all questions in Step Four about them, even if you do not live with them. (Note that grandparents and legal guardians are not parents.)

Time after time, I watched students struggle through the same questions and then leave the answers blank, folding the form back into their bag in a huff of anger or with a sigh of quiet resignation. Was this, I began to wonder, what Sennett and Cobb (1972) meant by "the hidden injuries of class?"

"Pennsylvania didn't want me"

Taking a step into a different social world—where they don't know the rules, and are not sure they belong—places students' self-esteem on the line in way that is distinctly different from what middle-class students experience in their college-application process.12 In their research with working-class residents of Boston the late 1970s, Sennett and Cobb found that attempts at mobility worked on the deepest levels of people's psyches, and affected their sense of their own abilities. "These were, after all, people who had experienced frustration, who had suffered from a gnawing sense of powerlessness, who had been treated for most of their life as undistinctive. All of that experience, which had to do with the structure of class, had presented itself to them as a problem with the structure of their own characters; and so there lay an unspoken distrust of themselves below the surface, a feeling of doubt" (1972, p. 182).

For the students whom I followed, this often took the form of backing away from the dreams they had articulated at the beginning of the year. McDonough explains that college-attendance patterns are as much an issue of self-selection processes as they are of college-admissions decisions, because students self-select themselves out based on their SAT scores (1997, p. 3). And Bourdieu and Passeron (writing about the French system in the 1970s) argue that, "Most of those excluded from studying at the various levels of education eliminate themselves before being examined . . . previous performance being equal, pupils of working-class origin are more likely to ‘eliminate themselves' from secondary education by declining to enter it" (1977, p.153).

Most of the students whom I worked with were unwilling to do this—as their doubts surfaced powerfully in the spring (waiting to hear from colleges), they clung fiercely to their determination to go on to higher education. But while I watched middle-class students read college rejection letters as individual statements from particular schools, several poor and working-class students seemed to attribute a more global meaning to them, and to have much more visceral reactions. These students, from the most timid to the most confident, made moves to protect themselves from the possibility or reality of rejection.

Arriving for college class at Vista Academy one day in April, Carina announced to the room, "I didn't get into the University of Maryland. I burned my letter." In telling me about her acceptances, Saquina explained that she hadn't gotten in to two schools in Pennsylvania, Lafayette, and Bucknell. "I guess Pennsylvania didn't want me," she said sadly. And, after anxiously checking the mail for weeks, Amelia grew frustrated with not hearing from Lang College, her first choice. When, several weeks later, she did finally get an acceptance letter from them, she decided not to go. "I don't want to go there anymore," she complained, "They waited too long to tell me."

One of the teachers at Vista—having grown up poor in New York City and begun higher education at a community college before transferring to Harvard—explained how he understood students' reactions. "I didn't have a college degree until two years ago. And I had a looming suspicion in my life that the other guy knows more than me . . . a lot of young people of color feel that way . . . . Whenever I'd go anywhere else, particularly if there were white students—I'd worry that I'm not as smart, I'd look at the words they use, the way they speak. They speak the language of power."

Thus, at important moment of transition, painful questions of self and identity—questions that are rooted in students' class identity more than their individual abilities or personalities—rear their heads for poor and working-class students. While I watched many, many students fight their way through these doubts, it was also clear that the risks involved often pushed them towards certain decisions and away from others. As Laura explained it when I spoke to her in the summer, having come out the other end of the process, "The hardest thing about the application process wasn't the essays or the applications, but the motivation. It just seemed like I was going to fall short from what they were looking for."13

"If I don't go to college, I'll end up working at McDonald's"

Research on poor and working-class parents universally cites their desire for their children to go to college (Knight et al., 2003; McDonough, 1997; Stanton-Salazar, 2001; Tierney, 2002, Walkerdine, Lucey & Melody, 2001; Weis, 1990). Unlike middle-class parents, however, these desires carry an extra weight for children: for they are tinged with parental hopes for children to achieve something that they could not, and freighted with their own tremendous, daily sacrifices on their children's behalf (Sennett & Cobb, 1972; Stanton-Salazar, 2001; Weis, 1990).

I heard these sentiments echoed in my conversations with parents. For many parents, they were reflecting on the things that had gotten in their own way of completing their education. Talking to Jasmine's father earlier in the year, he explained:

"My sense is she'll have the opportunity to do better away from home. I want her to experience campus life. Here it seems to be more of a grind—it's easy to get distracted, you need money to live in New York. You sort of get sidetracked, things happen. That's what happened to me—and then you find it's too hard to go back."

Carmine's mother did finish college, and in fact ultimately went on for a master's degree. She wants her daughter to be able to experience the campus life she only tasted. "I was away for a year, and then I stayed in the city and went to Fordham, because of Carmine. ‘How come you came back home?' she asked me. ‘You,' I told her (i.e., she got pregnant). I loved being away. That's why I push for her to go away. I think it's a life she'll never have again."

In talking about their hopes for college, then, poor and working-class students expressed a sense of what was at stake very different from that of middle-class students. While one middle-class Tower student talked about the difference college would make in terms of "going to graduate school or what jobs you can get, depending on what school you go to," Connections High and Vista students, in particular, spoke of an escape from a depressingly familiar world of low-wage work, violence, and poverty on urban streets. For themselves and their families, these students carry an additional weight of hope and fear. "If I don't go to college, I'll end up working at McDonald's," Jasmine voiced in one conversation. Jason stated vehemently, "I'll kill myself if I don't get out of the city."

At the same time, many poor and working-class parents worry about sending their children off to a world that is alien to them. While middle-class professional parents, having gone to college campuses themselves, or working now in professional worlds where they encounter life on college campuses, have a rough picture of where their children are headed, this is often not the case for poor and working-class parents. They may have only actually set foot on a college campus once or twice—or their picture of college may come from television and movies rather than personal experience. How, then, can they anticipate the issues their children will face, and how will they be able to help them if they run into trouble? Will they be able to stay connected to their children as they head off to this new world? Thus, as Fine and Burns note, so-called opportunities for mobility are rarely clean. "More often they are fraught with ambivalence, loyalty oaths, and alienation . . . ‘opportunities to succeed' may tear at the fabric of biography, identity, loyalty and belonging . . . poor and working-class students confront a loyalty oath far more often than middle-class and elite students do." (2003, p. 850)

Poor and working-class young people sense these worries, and it heightens their own anxieties about going away. While middle- and upper-class parents may resist having their children travel across the country for college, any place outside of New York City seemed too far away for many of the parents in my research. Ana explains," I've been battling, because my mom doesn't want me to go away because she'll miss me, but sometimes I want to go away. So then I change my mind . . . I don't know, it's just confusing to me."

These fears and desires weigh heavily on a time already freighted with so much. As winter of their senior year turned into spring, the anxiety in the air at Connections and Vista was palpable.

"I just want to surprise her in the end"

Finally, as pioneers in this new world, poor and working-class students must face these risks alone in ways that most middle-class students do not need to. A great deal of research reports low-income students facing this difficulty (Knight, 2004; McDonough, 1997; Stanton-Salazar, 2001; Tierney, 2002; Weis, 1990). Lacking the "social capital" (Coleman, 1988) or "cosmopolitan networks" (Stanton-Salazar, 2001) of their middle-class peers, these students often do not have adults whom they can turn to for help with the many and often confusing elements of applying for college. While poor and working-class students at Vista, Tower, and Connections often compiled their college lists alone or with their college counselor, did much of the application themselves, and struggled alongside their parents to fill out financial aid forms—or completed them alone—middle-class students received a great deal of help with all of these tasks (McDonough, 1997).

At Tower, Aaron's mother admitted that she had sent away for all of her son's applications; her son confirmed this, adding, "I didn't fill out any applications. My mom did. I mean, not like. . . like, when they asked me to answer something, I answered it. But she actually filled them out. And she was the one who printed out all the transcript request forms, got all the supplementary applications. . . ." Parents also used their connections to get interviews and letters of recommendation for their children, paid to mail applications express at the last minute, and assumed it was their responsibility, not their children's, to fill out FAFSA applications.14

Meanwhile, Fernando, a student at Vista, lamented, "I don't really talk a lot with my parents about college, because, I mean, it's different because my parents, they didn't go to college, you know. Like I can't approach them with all kinds of stuff, like what's this, what's this . . . because they don't really know. So, they could give me some advice, just like, ‘Don't worry.' That's basically all. . . ."

The immense differences in help that students received—based on their class location—were most often invisible to them, however. While middle-class students appreciated their parents' help, they also saw it as ordinary—simply what parents do—and they continued to see themselves as the main actors in their college search. Poor and working-class students, on the other hand, braved the process alone, believing that this was what it meant to become "grown-ups" and expecting little in the way of assistance. When I asked Saquina whether or not she had discussed college with her mother—and whether or not her mother would be able to help out with paying—she responded, "She's got a lot of stuff to do—I want her to be informed, but I just want to surprise her in the end. So if I have to take out loans, pressure's on me, if I have to do it, I will, just to get by."

It is this invisibility that allows an ideology of meritocracy to prevail in our national consciousness, as well as in the consciousness of young people, that "camouflages structural group-level barriers, and points a damning finger at individuals who seem to be personally responsible when they don't succeed" (Fine & Burns, 2003).

Stanton-Salazar and Spina (2000) note, "The most toxic effects of individualism are experienced by those with the least education and capital . . . rather than interpreting the premium placed on self-reliance as an ideological cover, it is taken as a prescription for actual behavior" (p. 240). Middle- and upper-class students comfortably take credit for their successes, while poor and working-class students and parents take responsibility for their failures—both too often unaware of the difference in resources that lie beneath the differing outcomes.

CONCLUSION

The last year of high school and the process of figuring out one's next life destination is a momentous, stressful time in the life of all young people, whatever their social class background. Students must reconcile their dreams and fantasies of the future with real places and options; they must face the potential pain of rejection, having put themselves and their pride on the line; whatever they do, they must face leaving the familiar routines of K-12 education and perhaps their homes and communities as well.

The challenges and risks that the transition to college entail, however, are profoundly different depending on students' social class location. The lived experience of social class—on financial, social, and psychological levels—shapes students' perceptions, experiences, and decision-making processes in ways both conscious and unconscious as they travel through their senior year of high school. For middle-class students, at this point in American history, this most often means struggling with where they will go to college—but not if. Poor and working-class students, however, face a different reality. Despite the clear financial benefits of a college education, these students read the world around them and correctly perceive the many ifs, the tremendous risks that they must take in order to reach for the social mobility that a college education promises. So much that middle-class students take for granted, they cannot assume.

The relative lack of attention to the role of social class in youth development—both within academic literature until recently, and in the world of education and educational policy—renders invisible the very different ground upon which young people stand at this important crossroads. Aronowitz (2003) argues that "class denial is woven into the fabric of American life," (p.150) and the consequences of this denial are, too often, to misread and misjudge the aspirations, motivations, and decision-making processes of poor and working-class youth and their families and communities. In order to even begin to understand the world through their eyes, we must do a better job of standing in their shoes.

Attempting—through my research—to stand in those shoes for just a moment, many of the prevailing notions about the "contradictory" attitudes that low-income students of color hold about education and higher education began to look quite like something else. In fundamental ways, poor and working-class young people are "reading the world" (Freire & Macedo, 1987): weighing the risks of taking an economic gamble on the social mobility that college promises but does not always deliver; deciphering messages about who does and does not belong on a college campus; and trying to maintain their own psychological dignity and self-esteem in the face of myriad challenges to it. They understand, better than any college administrator, academic researcher, or educational policy-maker, the leap they must take to place themselves in a new and unfamiliar world, and the chance for broken bones they risk in their landing. Rather than the contradictions that these students express, in their words and actions, existing inside the bodies and minds of young people, these contradictions are external, a part of the world in which they must negotiate their development/identity, and make their way.

That world—an America in which opportunity is theoretically available to all, and yet systematically denied on the basis of class, in intricate and often hidden ways—too often constrains young people's development, and then blames them (and makes them blame themselves) for the outcomes. If we are to truly understand the lived realities of these students—and find ways to help them in their journey to college—we need to recognize the role of social class in the America that we all inhabit.

Notes

1 Support for the specific research reported on in this article came from the Rockefeller Foundation and the Spencer Foundation Social Justice and Social Development in Education Studies Training Grant. The data was collected under the umbrella of a larger research project, the Opportunity Gap Project (Michelle Fine, principal investigator). With support from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Opportunity Gap Project worked with a multigenerational, multi-site team of researchers in New York and New Jersey to study how urban and suburban teens perceive the processes and consequences of the racial "achievement gap". See Fine, et al (2004).

2 At each school, approximately half of the senior class took the surveys. Overall, a total of 253 surveys were collected at the three schools.

3 All names of both schools and students are pseudonyms.

4 Many of the students at these schools, therefore, sit at the intersection of race and class, a not-unusual situation in this country, where race too often over-predicts class. In this article, I focus on the particular social class effects of sitting at this juncture.

5 Carnevale and Rose (2003) found an inverse relationship between the percentage of students receiving free lunch at a school, and the percentage who take college-entrance exams; similarly, a study conducted by MPR Associates for the Education Department in 1997 (using data from the NELS-88) suggests that across the country, many needy students who are qualified for college do not bother to take college-entrance exams or fill out applications (Burd, 2002).

6 Literature on small schools shows a consistent and often strong relationship between school size and higher graduation and college-going rates for low-income students of color (Gladden, 1998). Lindsay (1984) and Sares (1992) both found that, even when controlling for factors such as ability and high-school achievement, smaller high-school size is related to completing more years of college and graduate education for these students.

7 Most public school systems have no mechanism for collecting this data.

8 A quote I heard repeatedly at all three high schools.

9 As part of the larger Opportunity Gap Survey, Fine et al. (2004).

10 Again, the majority of middle-class students at Tower are white, while the majority of students of color come from lower-income backgrounds.

11 U.S. Census Bureau Current Population Survey.

12 Which is not to say that this is not a difficult process for middle-class students, and one that puts their self-esteem on the line as well, but to argue that is a different—and ultimately less threatening—kind of risk.

13 Laura was accepted into a post-graduate program at Northfield Mount-Hermon after graduating from Vista Academy, and is currently attending Wesleyan University.

14 The resources invested in middle-class students in fact often begins before their senior year, in the form of SAT prep classes, tutors, and experiences at summer camps and on trips which they can write about in their college essays, etc.

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Cite This Article as: Teachers College Record Volume 109 Number 2, 2007, p. -

http://www.tcrecord.org ID Number: 12792, Date Accessed: 1/30/2007 2:51:36 PM

By Benji Chang and Wayne Au

Have you ever sat next to an Asian student in class and wondered how she managed to consistently get straight A's while you struggled to maintain a B-minus average?

-from Top of the Class: How Asian Parents Raise High Achievers-and How You Can Too

In January 1966, William Petersen penned an article for The New York Times Magazine entitled, "Success Story: Japanese American Style." In it, he praised the Japanese-American community for its apparent ability to successfully assimilate into mainstream American culture, and literally dubbed Japanese Americans a "model minority" - the first popular usage of the term.

By the 1980s, Newsweek, The New Republic, Fortune, Parade, U.S. News and World Report, and Time all had run articles on the subject of Asian-American success in schools and society, and the Myth of the Model Minority was born. The Myth of the Model Minority asserts that, due to their adherence to traditional, Asian cultural values, Asian-American students are supposed to be devoted, obedient to authority, respectful of teachers, smart, good at math and science, diligent, hard workers, cooperative, well-behaved, docile, college-bound, quiet, and opportunistic.

Top of the Class (quoted above) is a perfect modern example. Published in 2005, the authors claim to offer readers 17 "secrets" that Asian parents supposedly use to develop high school graduates who earn A-pluses and head to Ivy League colleges. It's a marketing concept built purely on the popular belief in the Myth of the Model Minority.

However, in both of our experiences as public school teachers and education activists, we've seen our share of Asian-American students do poorly in school, get actively involved in gangs, drop out, or exhibit any number of other indicators of school failure not usually associated with "model minorities."

A critical unmasking of this racist myth is needed because it both negatively affects the classroom lives of Asian American students and contributes to the justification of race and class inequality in schools and society.

Masking Diversity

On the most basic level, the Myth of the Model Minority masks the diversity that exists within the Asian-American community. The racial category of "Asian" is itself emblematic of the problem. Asia contains nearly four billion people and over 50 countries, including those as diverse as Turkey, Japan, India, the Philippines, and Indonesia.

The racial category of "Asian" is also historically problematic. Similar to those categories used to name peoples from Africa and the Americas, the definition of Asia as a continent (and race) and division of Asians into various nations was developed to serve the needs of European and U.S. colonialism and imperialism. The category of Asian gets even fuzzier in the context of the United States, since there are over 50 ways to officially qualify as an Asian American according to government standards. Pacific Islanders and "mixed race" Asians are also regularly squished together under the banner of Asian or Asian Pacific Islander (which, out of respect for the sovereignty of Pacific peoples, we refuse to do here).

Masking the Class Divide

The Myth of the Model Minority, however, masks another form of diversity-that of economic class division. As Jamie Lew explains in her 2007 book, Asian Americans in Class, there are increasing numbers of working-class Korean-American students in New York City performing more poorly in schools than their middle-class counterparts.

Similarly, Vivian Louie found class-based differences in her study of Chinese-American students. Her research indicated that middle-class Chinese-American mothers tended to have more time, resources, and educational experience to help their children through school and into college than mothers from working-class Chinese-American families, who had longer work hours, lower-paying jobs, and lower levels of education. These class differences are sometimes rooted in specific immigrant histories and are connected to the 1965 Immigration Act. The Act not only opened up the United States to large numbers of Asian immigrants, but, among a handful of other criteria, it granted preference to educated professionals and those committing to invest at least $40,000 in a business once they arrived.

As a consequence, some Asian immigrants, even those within the same ethnic community, enter the United States with high levels of education and/or with economic capital attained in their countries of origin. Others enter the United States with little or no education or money at all. These educational and financial heritages make an important difference in how well children gain access to educational resources in the United States. In other words, whether we are talking about African-American, white, Latina/o, indigenous, or "model minority" Asian-American students, the first rule of educational inequality still applies: Class matters.

Masking Ethnic Inequity

To add to the complexity of Asian-American diversity, many of the class differences amongst Asian Americans also correlate with ethnic differences. According to the 2000 census, 53.3 percent of Cambodians, 59.6 percent of Hmong, 49.6 percent of Laotians, and 38.1 percent of Vietnamese over 25 years of age have less than a high school education. In contrast, 13.3 percent of Asian Indians, 12.7 percent of Filipinos, 8.9 percent of Japanese, and 13.7 percent of Koreans over 25 years of age have less than a high school education.

These educational disparities are particularly striking considering that, for instance, 37.8 percent of Hmong, almost 30 percent of Cambodians, and 18.5 percent of Laotians have incomes below the poverty line (compared to 12.4 percent of the total U.S population). Indeed, the 2000 census reveals relatively consistent high education rates and income amongst South Asian, Korean, and Chinese Americans, and relatively low education rates and low income amongst Cambodian, Lao, and Hmong Americans. Hence, the Myth of the Model Minority serves to obscure the struggles of poor or "under-educated" families working to gain a decent education for their children.

Masking Economic Circumstance

One of the most cited statistics proving the Myth of the Model minority is that Asian Americans even out earn whites in income. What is obscured in this "fact" is that it is only true when we compare Asian American household income to white household income, and the reality is that Asian-Americans make less per person compared to whites. Statistically, the average household size for Asian Americans is 3.3 people, while for whites it is 2.5 people.

Consequently, Asian-American households are more likely than white households to have more than one income earner, and almost twice as likely to have three income earners. When we take these issues into account, Asian-American individuals earn $2,000 on average less than white individuals.

The statistics on Asian-American income are further skewed upward when we look at the economies of the states where the majority live. The three states with the highest proportion of Asian Americans, Hawai'i, California, and New York, all have median income levels in the top third of states. This means that, regardless of statistically higher household incomes, the high cost of living in states with large Asian-American populations guarantees that Asian Americans, on average, are more likely to have less disposable income and lower living standards than whites.

Masking Racism

While the above statistics may be remarkable in the face of the Myth of the Model Minority, they also point to another serious problem: The myth is regularly used as a social and political wedge against blacks, Latina/os, and other racial groups in the United States.

The racist logic of the model minority wedge is simple. If, according to the myth, Asian Americans are academically and socially successful due to particular cultural or racial strengths, then lower test scores, lower GPAs, and lower graduation rates of other groups like African Americans and Latina/os can be attributed to their cultural or racial weaknesses.

Or, as one high school guidance counselor in Stacey J. Lee's book, Unraveling the Model Minority Stereotype, puts it, "Asians like... M.I.T., Princeton. They tend to go to good schools... I wish our blacks would take advantage of things instead of sticking to sports and entertainment."

The Myth of the Model Minority also causes Asian-American students to struggle with the racist expectations the myth imposes upon them. An Asian-American high school student in Lee's book explains, "When you get bad grades, people look at you really strangely because you are sort of distorting the way they see an Asian."

Unfortunately, some East and South Asian Americans uphold the myth because it allows them to justify their own relative educational and social success in terms of individual or cultural drive, while simultaneously allowing them to distance themselves from what they see as African-American, Latina/o, indigenous, and Southeast-Asian-American educational failure.

As Jamie Lew observes, the Myth of the Model Minority "...attributes academic success and failure to individual merit and cultural orientation, while underestimating important structural and institutional resources that all children need in order to achieve academically." In doing so, the Myth of the Model Minority upholds notions of racial and cultural inferiority of other lower achieving groups, as it masks the existence of racism and class exploitation in this country.

The Challenge of Educating Asian America

One of the difficulties of unmasking the Myth of the Model Minority is that the diversity of the Asian American experience poses substantial challenges, particularly in relation to how race, culture, and ethnicity are typically considered by educators.

For instance, Asian-American students challenge the categories commonly associated with the black-brown-white spectrum of race. Many Asian American students follow educational pathways usually attributed to white, middle-class, suburban students, while many others follow pathways usually attributed to black and Latina/o, working-class, urban students.

Other Asian-American groups challenge typical racial categories in their own identities. Pilipinos,1 for instance, don't quite fit into the typical categories of South, East, or Southeast Asian, nor do they quite fit the category of Pacific Islander. Further, some argue that Pilipinos have a lineage that is more closely related to Latina/os because they were in fact colonized by Spain. Consequently, because of their particular circumstances, many Pilipinos more strongly identify with being brown than anything else. As another example, many high-achieving, middle-class South Asians consider themselves "brown," especially after the discrimination endured after 9/11.

Asian-American students also challenge typical notions of immigration and language by blurring the typical dichotomies of native language vs. English and immigrant vs. American-born. Some Southeast Asian refugees, like those from Laos, may develop fluency in multiple languages and attend universities, even as their parents are low-income and do not speak English. On the other hand, there are groups of Pilipinos who grow up highly Americanized, who have been taught English their whole lives, but who have some of the highest dropout and suicide rates.

Asian-American students also challenge popularly accepted multicultural teaching strategies because they are often a numerical minority in classrooms, and multicultural teaching strategies designed to meet the needs of classroom majorities can leave out the culturally specific needs of Asian-American students. These can include the language acquisition needs of students who come from character-based languages (e.g., Chinese, Japanese), social and ideological differences of students from majority Muslim nations (e.g., Pakistan, Indonesia), and psychological issues that emerge from student families traumatized by U.S. intervention/war policies (e.g., Korea, Vietnam, Thailand).

From the Fukienese-Chinese student in an urban Philadelphia classroom with mostly Black or Latino/a students, to the Hmong student who sits with two or three peers in a mostly white school in rural Wisconsin, to the Pilipino student in a San Diego suburb with predominantly Pilipino classmates and some white peers, Asian-American youth do not fit neatly into the typical boxes of our educational system.

Unmasking the Myth In Our Classrooms

Despite the diversity and complexity inherent in working with Asian-American populations, there are many things that educators can do to challenge the Myth of the Model Minority. Similar to other communities of color, effective steps include recruiting more educators from Asian-American backgrounds, promoting multilingual communication in instruction and parent involvement, and developing relationships between parents, community groups, and schools. Within the classroom, teachers can make use of several strategies to counter the Myth of the Model Minority in their own classrooms. The following list offers a starting point to address the realities of Asian-American students' lives.

Don't automatically assume that your Asian-American students are "good" students (or "bad," for that matter), and get to know them.

Personally get to know students and their family's practices, which widely vary from home to home, despite their "membership" in specific ethnic or linguistic groups. Start by researching the specific histories and cultures of the students in your classroom to better understand the historical and political contexts of their communities. Also, bring the lives of all of your students, Asian Americans included, into your classroom. Have them consider, reflect, and write about how their home lives and experiences intersect with their school lives and experiences. Develop strategies to personally engage with students and their communities, whether through lunchtime interactions or visits to their homes, community centers, and cultural or political events. While we recognize the limited resources of all teachers, learning about your Asian-American students and their communities takes the same energy and commitment as learning to work with any specific group of students.

Rethink how you interpret and act upon the silence of Asian-American students in your classroom.

Asian-American student silence can mean many things, from resistance to teachers, to disengagement from work, to a lack of understanding of concepts, to thoughtful engagement and consideration, to insecurity speaking English, to insecurity in their grasp of classroom content. Rather than assume that Asian-American student silence means any one thing, assess the meaning of silence by personally checking in with the student individually.

Teach about unsung Asian-American heroes.

Teachers might include the stories of real-life woman warriors Yuri Kochiyama and Grace Lee Boggs, for instance. Kochiyama has been involved in a range of efforts, from working closely with Malcolm X in Harlem, to Puerto Rican sovereignty, to freeing political prisoners like Mumia Abu Jamal. Boggs' efforts have included work with famed Marxist Humanist Raya Dunayevskaya, organized labor, and the Detroit Freedom Summer schools. Or perhaps teach about Ehren Watada, the first commissioned officer to publicly refuse to go to war in Iraq because he believes the war is illegal and would make him a party to war crimes. Learning about heroes like these can help students broaden the range of what it means to be Asian American.

Highlight ways in which Asian Americans challenge racism and stereotypes.

Schools should challenge racist caricatures of Asians and Asian Americans, including viewing them as penny-pinching convenience store owners, religious terrorists, kung fu fighting mobsters, academic super-nerds, and exotic, submissive women. One way to do this is to introduce students to stereotype-defying examples, such as Kochiyama, Boggs, and Watada. There are also many youth and multi-generational organizations of Asian Americans fighting for social justice in the U.S. These include Khmer Girls in Action (KGA, Long Beach), and the Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence/Organizing Asian Communities (CAAAV, New York). These organizations are extremely important examples of how youth can be proactive in challenging some of the issues that affect our communities, and their work challenges the stereotypes of Asian Americans as silent and obedient.

Illustrate historical, political, and cultural intersections between Asian Americans and other groups.

There are historical and current examples of shared experiences between Asian Americans and other communities. For instance, teachers could highlight the key role of Asian Americans in collective struggles for social justice in the United States. Possible examples include: Philip Veracruz and other Pilipino farm workers who were the backbone and catalyst for the labor campaigns of Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers in the late 1960s and early 1970s; Chinese students and families who challenged the racism of public schools in the Lau v. Nichols case of the 1970s that provided the legal basis for guaranteeing the rights of English language learners and bilingual education; Asian-American college students who in 1967-1969 organized with Black, Latina/o, and Native Americans at San Francisco State University in a multiethnic struggle to establish the first ethnic studies program in the nation, united under the banner of "Third World Liberation."

Weave the historical struggles, culture, and art of Asian-American communities into your classroom.

As part of a curriculum that is grounded in the lives of all of our students, teachers can highlight Asian-American history, culture, and art in their classroom practices to help Asian-American students develop not only positive self-identity, but also empathy between Asian Americans and other racial, cultural, or ethnic groups. Teachers might use novels by Carlos Bulosan, John Okada, Nora Okja Keller, Lê Thi Diem Thúy, Jessica Hagedorn, Jhumpa Lahiri, or Shawn Wong; poetry by Lawson Inada, Li-Young Li, Marilyn Chin, Nick Carbón, or Sesshu Foster; spoken word by Reggie Cabico, Ishle Park, Beau Sia, or I Was Born With Two Tongues; hip-hop music by Blues Scholars, Skim, Native Guns, Himalayan Project, or Kuttin Kandi; and history texts by Ron Takaki, Sucheng Chan, Peter Kwong, or Gary Okihiro.

When it comes to dealing with Asian Americans in education, it is all too common for people to ask, "What's wrong with the Myth of the Model Minority? Isn't it a positive stereotype?" What many miss is that there are no "positive" stereotypes, because by believing in a "positive" stereotype, as, admittedly, even many Asian Americans do, we ultimately give credence to an entire way of thinking about race and culture, one that upholds the stereotypic racial and cultural inferiority of African Americans and Latina/os and maintains white supremacy.

The Myth of the Model Minority not only does a disservice to Asian-American diversity and identity, it serves to justify an entire system of race and class inequality. It is perhaps for this reason, above all else, that the Myth of the Model Minority needs to be unmasked in our classrooms and used to challenge the legacies of racism and other forms of inequality that exist in our schools and society today.

Endnote:

Pilipino is a term used by some activists in the Pilipino-American community as means of challenging the way that Spanish and U.S. colonization of the islands also colonized the language by renaming them the Philippines after King Phillip, and introducing the anglicized "f" sound which did not exist in the indigenous languages there.

Cite this Article From: 22, no. 2 Winter 2007-2008 - Rethinking Schools

Reported by Scott Jaschik - June 12, 2009

Sixty-four percent of American faculty members at four-year colleges believe that their institutions have a "strong emphasis" on a "top down management style," according to an international survey of professors being released today at the annual meeting of the American Association of University Professors. Only 31 percent said that they believed there was a strong emphasis on collegiality in decision making, and only 30 percent believe that there is a strong emphasis on good communication between management of higher education and academics.

British professors in the survey had an even gloomier view on those measures of shared governance. Professors in China saw a bit more collegiality (35 percent) and less of a top down management style (57 percent).

The research project was conducted by William K. Cummings, a professor of international education and international affairs at George Washington University, and Martin J. Finkelstein, a professor of education at Seton Hall University. The survey was conducted in 2007, before the current economic downturn that has led, on many campuses, to difficult and controversial decisions that have left some professors wondering about the state of shared governance.

Generally, academics in industrialized democratic nations don't appear to believe that higher education is getting better. Asked whether conditions in higher education are "very much" or "much" improved over the course of their careers, 38 percent of Americans said Yes -- while the figures were 16 percent for Britain, 22 percent for Canada and 13 percent for Japan. In contrast, academics are much more likely to feel that they are seeing major improvements in China (61 percent), Malaysia (55 percent) and Mexico (47 percent).

Faculty members in the United States continue to believe that they are the primary decision makers with regard to faculty hiring and tenure. But relatively low percentages of faculty members believe that they have primary influence in many other factors of academic life. Some of these are in more traditionally administrative areas (budgets) but some are very much academic (evaluating teaching and research, setting research priorities, starting new academic programs). While professors in other Western nations also tend not to see themselves as the primary decision makers in many areas, American professors appear to feel less in control than do academics in Britain and Canada.

Percent of Faculty Members Who Believe Professors

Area U.S. Britain Canada

Selecting key administrators 10% 31% 33%

Choosing new faculty 62% 53% 84%

Making faculty tenure/promotion decisions 51% 51% 71%

Determining budget priorities 2% 26% 7%

Determining the overall teaching load of the faculty 11% 40% 21%

Setting admissions standards for undergraduates 20% 37% 37%

Approving new academic programs 37% 55% 41%

Evaluating teaching 26% 51% 25%

Setting internal research priorities 35% 55% 53%

Evaluating research 45% 43% 59%

Establishing international linkages 30% 57% 47%

Generally, American faculty members in the survey feel they have more influence at the departmental level than other levels of their institutions. Asked if faculty members are "very or somewhat influential" at American colleges, 73 percent said they did at the departmental level, 49 percent said they did at the level of school within a university, and only 21 percent said that they did at the institutional level.

While the survey results suggest that American (and other) faculty members don't feel that they have as much influence as many would like, they data also suggest that relatively few see this as a major crisis or worry about student involvement in decision-making. Between 1992 -- when a comparable survey was conducted -- and 2007, there was a modest increase in the percentages of American professors who believe their top administrators are competent (although that is still a minority opinion) and a modest decrease in the percentage who think their administrations support academic freedom.

American Faculty Attitudes 1992 and 2007

View % Who Agreed, 2007 % Who Agreed, 1992

Top administrators are providing competent leadership 41% 38%

Faculty are kept informed about what is going on at their institution 43% 41%

Lack of faculty involvement is a real problem 32% 43%

Sudents should have a stronger voice in determining policy that affects them 23% 27%

The administration supports academic freedom 59% 65%

He survey also asked faculty members around the world how much time they spend on various activities. American faculty members reported totals that, on average, well exceed a 40-hour work week and that allocate more time to teaching than those of their counterparts in many other countries. Several countries' academics reported that they spend more time on research, on average, than do their American counterparts.

Average Hours Per Week Reported by Faculty Members on Various Activities

Country Teaching Research Service Administration Other Academic Activities

U.S. 21.6 12.2 4.2 7.4 3.3

Britain 15.0 10.0 4.0 5.0 5.0

Canada 20.6 16.0 5.3 8.5 4.8

Japan 21.8 17.6 4.6 7.9 3.3

Korea 21.4 18.2 4.9 5.2 4.3

Hong Kong 19.9 16.0 4.0 8.5 3.6

China 20.1 16.4 4.8 8.3 3.6

Malaysia 20.1 10.0 2.0 10.0 2.0

Brazil 18.9 9.7 2.5 4.8 2.6

Mexico 21.5 7.6 0.9 7.9 5.6

Scott Jaschik

Inside Higher Education

June 12, 2009

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/06/12/survey

5 years after release of a report on the future of colleges, experts note improvements in access and accountability

By Kelly Field

Washington

Five years ago from Monday, Secretary Margaret Spellings's Commission on the Future of Higher Education issued a report that called on colleges to "improve in dramatic ways," becoming more accessible, more affordable, and more accountable to taxpayers and students.

At the time, James B. Hunt Jr., a commissioner and former governor of North Carolina, proclaimed the document "one of the most important reports in the educational and economic history of our country— if we act on it."

Since then, the U.S. House of Representatives has changed hands (twice), Democrats have captured the White House, and the nation has been roiled by recession. States have slashed spending on education, community colleges have become increasingly overcrowded, and college tuitions have continued their inexorable climb.

Despite those changes and challenges, some progress has been made on the recommendations of the commission. More states are aligning their high-school standards with college expectations; more colleges are using tests to measure student learning; and more money is being spent on federal student aid.

Of course, not all of the credit goes to the commission. Much of the work was under way when the report was released, and many of its recommendations were not new. Still, the commission's work, with its warning that the United States was falling behind its competitors, may have at least spurred some states, and some colleges, to action.

"When there's movement already, and you give it a push, it's hard to say where your contribution is," said Charles Miller, the commission's chairman. "I'm proud of the fact that we raised the issues and created some momentum."

So just how much has changed over the past five years? Following is a scorecard that rates progress on the commission's recommendations in three areas: access, affordability, and accountability.

ACCESS

1. Align graduation standards for public schools with college and employer expectations. (Thumb up)

In 2005, the year the commission was created, Achieve, a nonprofit education policy group, started the America Diploma Project Network to ensure that high-school graduates were prepared for college-level work. By 2006, 26 states had signed on to the project's benchmarks.

Those benchmarks became the foundation for the Common Core State Standards, released last year. Forty-four states, as well as the District of Columbia and the U.S. Virgin Islands, have adopted the standards, which specify what students should learn from kindergarten through high school, and 20 states have linked them to graduation requirements.

2. Perform early assessments to gauge students' readiness for college. (Thumb up)Fourteen states currently do such assessments, eight more than in 2006. Five have tests tied to state standards; nine require students to take a national college-admissions examination, like the SAT or ACT. Last year, as part of its Race to the Top effort, the White House awarded $330-million to two state consortia to develop tests tied to the common core standards.

Still, most state accountability systems do not judge schools based on their success in preparing students for college, said Michael W. Kirst, a professor emeritus of education at Stanford University. "The accountability systems are still operating in separate orbits," he said.

3. Expand early-college or dual-enrollment programs, as well as Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate courses. (Thumb-up)

Over the past five years, the Early College High School Initiative, one of the largest efforts to blend high school and college, has nearly tripled in size, to more than 230 schools. The Jobs for the Future project, which is backed by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, allows underrepresented students to simultaneously earn a high-school diploma and an associate degree or credit toward a bachelor's degree. Several states have also created early-college high schools.

From 2006 to 2011, the number of students taking AP exams grew by 600,000, to 1.9 million, while the number of high schools offering the courses grew by more than 2,000, to 18,340, according to the College Board, which administers the test. During that time, International Baccalaureate courses grew by 45 percent.

4. To improve access and reduce time-to-completion, revise standards for transfer of credit among higher-education institutions. (So-so)

Since 2006, 29 states have passed laws aimed at improving their transfer policies. Several have established common course-numbering systems for their public colleges and identified a general-education core; a handful guarantee that community-college credits will count toward a bachelor's degree. But there is little evidence that the policies have increased transfer or graduation rates, according to a recent report by the College Board and the National Conference of State Legislatures. And most credit-transfer decisions remain in the hands of faculty members, who must decide whether a course taken elsewhere is equivalent to their own.

"I don't believe that time-to-degree has been expedited over the past five years, and it may actually have increased," said Barmak Nassirian, an associate executive director of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers. Any "marginal" progress in shortening paths to graduation has probably been undone by the recession, campus overcrowding, and lack of access to courses, he added.

5. Redesign the 12th-grade National Assessment of Educational Progress to measure a student's readiness for college and the work force, and provide state by state reports. (Thumb-up)

The National Assessment Governing Board, which sets policy for the test, had already voted to do that in 2006. The board redesigned the 12th-grade NAEP in time for the 2009 test, which was the first to sample students at the state level, rather than just nationally. The board is now studying the test's ability to measure preparedness for college and the work force.

AFFORDABILITY

1. Restructure the entire student-aid system to improve the measurement and management of costs and productivity, and consolidate the federal grant programs. (Thumb down)

No progress has been made on this recommendation. Though Congress has killed a handful of small programs, including the Leveraging Educational Assistance Program, it has not done so in a systematic way. Rather, it has sacrificed the programs to pay for the Pell Grant program, which has doubled in size over the past three years.

2. The federal government, states, and institutions should significantly increase need-based student aid. (So-so)

Before Democrats took control of Congress, in 2007, the maximum Pell Grant award had been frozen at $4,050 for four years. It now stands at $5,550.

But spending on other student-aid programs has stagnated, and in some cases declined. Pell Grants, meanwhile, are more vulnerable than they've ever been, as a Congressional committee prepares to slash billions from the federal budget this fall.

Even with their budgetary woes, states managed to raise their spending on student aid by $1.2-billion from 2006-7 to 2009-10, to $8.87-billion.

3. Replace the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or Fafsa, with a simpler application form, and provide students with earlier information about their financial-aid eligibility. (Thumb-up)

Though Secretary Spellings proposed overhauling the Fafsa, the most significant changes—such as allowing Fafsa filers to import information from their income-tax returns electronically—took place under her successor, Arne Duncan. Still, the Bush administration deserves credit for the Fafsa4caster, which provides students with early estimates of their aid eligibility and fills in portions of the Fafsa

4. Require accreditation agencies to act more swiftly in evaluating institutions. (Thumb down)

There is no evidence that accreditation reviews have sped up, and they may even have slowed down, as accreditors have come under greater scrutiny from Congress and the Education Department, said Robert C. Dickeson, a higher-education consultant who wrote a report on accreditation for the commission.

"They're crossing every t twice and dotting every i a couple times," he said. "They know they're under the microscope."

5. Relieve the regulatory burden on colleges and universities. (Thumb-down)

The 2008 reauthorization of the Higher Education Act doubled colleges' reporting burden, while requiring a review of all regulations affecting higher-education institutions. That study, by the Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance, has since been narrowed to focus on regulations under the Higher Education Act. Preliminary results are due out at this month. (Lawmakers also directed the National Academy of Sciences to conduct a similar study, but never provided the funds to pay for it.)

"Congress promised a lot in 2008, but it never really materialized," said Margaret L. O'Donnell, a lawyer at Catholic University of America who tracks regulations and wrote a paper on the topic for the commission. "We out here in the field are drowning in regs."

ACCOUNTABILITY

1. Create a searchable, consumer-friendly database that shows how colleges are performing and whether students are learning. (So-So)College Navigator, the department's college-search tool, provides extensive information about costs, graduation rates, and student-loan default rates, among other things, and it allows users to compare up to four institutions. But it does not contain data on student-learning outcomes, and it does not allow students to rank institutions, as the commission suggested.

2. Develop a privacy-protected higher-education information system that collects, analyzes, and uses student-level, rather than aggregate, data. (So-so)

Congress, citing privacy concerns, barred the Education Department in 2008 from creating a national "unit record" data system that resembled what the commission called for. But federal lawmakers have provided millions of dollars to help states develop such systems on their own, including $250-million in the economic-stimulus law enacted in 2009. Last year, 45 states had databases containing information on college students, though only 28 tracked their transition from high school to college, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

The expansion of state student-record systems is central to President Obama's accountability agenda, which seeks to improve education through the smarter use of data. In April the Education Department issued proposed rules that would allow high-school administrators and state officials to share information on individual students with researchers, auditors, and other agencies without violating students' privacy.

3. Provide incentives for states, higher-education associations, and colleges to develop better accountability systems. (Thumb-up)

In 2007 the Education Department awarded $2.45-million to three higher-education associations to develop measures for assessing learning by undergraduates. One group, the Association of American Colleges and Universities, developed a set of 15 value rubrics through which institutions could evaluate student learning. More than 2,000 institutions now use the rubrics.

Two associations that represent the nation's public colleges developed a voluntary accountability system that includes an assessment of student learning. More than 60 percent of the groups' member colleges—319 institutions—have signed up to use it.

4. Use assessment data to measure student learning. (So-so)

When the commission published its report, the Collegiate Learning Assessment, a test that measures what students learn between their freshman and senior years, was being used by 121 institutions, and 30,000 students had taken the test. Five years later, roughly 200 colleges use the test and 10 times as many students have taken it. Not every college publishes its results, though the participating public colleges do. Use of another test recommended by the commission, the Measure of Academic Proficiency and Progress, is up 33 percent, according to its creator, the Educational Testing Service.

5. Accreditation agencies should make colleges' performance, including completion rates and student learning, the core of their assessments. And the agencies should make their findings available to the public. (So-So)

Shortly after the commission released its report, the Education Department announced that it would rewrite federal rules governing accreditation to require accreditors to focus more on learning outcomes. Congress responded by prohibiting the department from dictating how colleges measure student learning for purposes of accreditation and wresting control from the department of the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity, or Naciqi, the federal agency that oversees accreditors.

Still, Naciqi has continued to push accreditors to demand more evidence of student learning and to make their findings more public. Some accreditors now post summaries of their actions online, along with information about their decisions.

"The process is more open," said Judith S. Eaton, president of the Council for Higher Education Accreditation. "It's not as open as some people want, but there has been progress."

Students Then and Now: By the Numbers

Today's high-school seniors are better at mathematics and reading than they were in 2005, and they're more likely to graduate. But they're borrowing more to pay for college, and graduating with more debt.

Percentage of high school seniors considered proficient in math and reading

Math 2005 - 17 2009 - 26

R3ading 2005 - 36 2009 - 38

Source: National Assessment of Educational Progress, 2055, 2009

US Ranking in Higher-Education Attainment and high school graduation

Attainment 2005 - 12 2011 - 16

Graduation 2005 - 16 2011 - 12

Source: Organisztion for Economic Cooperation and Development "Education at a Glance" 2005, 2011

http://chronicle.com/article/5-Years-Later-the-Impact-of/129053/

September 18, 2011

Spellings Panel Spurred Progress in Some Key Areas but Failed to Remake American Higher Education

5 years after release of a report on the future of colleges, experts note improvements in access and accountability

By Kelly Field

by Scott Gelber — 2007

Background/Context

Although increasing numbers of scholars have begun to focus on student experiences, research on the history of underrepresented populations' transition to college is still in its formative stage. The classic histories of higher education have tended to focus on university infrastructure and intellectual life rather than on student experiences. In addition, historians studying college enrollment generally have not used the policy frameworks of preparation, access, finance, and completion as their central analytical categories. Instead, most historians have organized their work around individual institutions and the categories of race, gender, and class.

Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study

This article explores the question of what historical scholarship might contribute to current campaigns for equal access to higher education.

Research Design

This study was a literature review of all historical scholarship on college access produced in the last twenty five years. Literature was identified by searches on ERIC, Academic Search Premier, and JSTOR, and by consulting the references of the most commonly cited works in this field. For purposes of analysis, the review is divided into sections on "Preparation," "Admissions," "Finance," and "Retention." Each section highlights potential implications for contemporary thinking about college access and recommends future areas for historical inquiry. This essay does not claim to be an exhaustive survey of all historical scholarship on college access. Instead, the article focuses on work representing broad themes and major debates in the historiography as well as scholarship which touches most directly on transitions to college.

Conclusions/Recommendations

First, evidence from the nineteenth century suggests that even elite liberal arts colleges can take an active role in providing college preparation while still remaining true to other aspects of their academic mission. Secondly, although the increasing interest in "merit" once served to expand access to college by opening admissions to academically skilled but socially or economically marginalized students, it became a hurdle for equal access by the final third of the twentieth century. Since colleges have struggled to articulate a consistent measurement of student merit, it is unclear if it is possible to determine a coherent or constructive college mission based on this concept. Third, market forces have occasionally motivated institutions to expand access to underrepresented populations, state intervention has generally been necessary to increase access to college. Finally, the most powerful lesson that history can provide may be reminding politicians that experts have typically underestimated the extent of the demand for higher education by both students and employers.

As part of their preparation for Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the NAACP asked several historians to determine whether the authors of the Fourteenth Amendment intended to desegregate public schools. During the summer of 1953, Horace Mann Bond, C. Vann Woodward, and John Hope Franklin conducted research on the amendment's political and social context. By demonstrating that the original spirit of the amendment was broad and egalitarian, these historians contributed to the formulation of the NAACP's legal strategy (Kluger, 1975, 2004). Rather than marking the beginning of a sustained relationship between historians, lawyers, and policy-makers, this episode stands out as an exceptional case. Fifty years later, historians have still not fully documented the ways in which prior discrimination have shaped current inequalities in educational access and achievement. According to James Anderson, historians of higher education have remained "disconnected" from political questions, despite the fact that law and public policy are frequently based upon historical assumptions (Mattingly, Anderson, Church, Curran, & Tobias, 2004).

This disconnect is not a simple case of apathy within the ranks of historians. Unlike activists, historians tend to be wary of drawing overt connections between past and present policy debates. Even as Woodward was assisting the Brown plaintiffs, he advised the NAACP that his advocacy was "constrained" by the nature of his craft. Reflecting decades later upon the pressures faced by historians who relate their scholarship to current events, Woodward cautioned academics "to stay out of the kitchen if you can't take the heat" (Vinovskis, 1999).

Sensitive to Woodward's warnings, this essay explores what historical scholarship might contribute to advocates for equal access to higher education. This essay divides the issue of the transition to college for students from underrepresented populations into subtopics of "preparation," "admissions," "retention," and "finance." Each section of the essay summarizes what historians already know, highlights potential implications for contemporary thinking about college access, and recommends future areas for historical inquiry into college access.

Prior to the 1970s, historians had conducted very little research into college access that would have been useful to policy-makers. Most classic histories of higher education were narratives of institutional and academic expansion which made scant reference to the changing demographics of student bodies. While increasing numbers of historians have begun to focus on student experiences, our understanding of the expansion of college enrollments still pales in comparison to our knowledge of other aspects of higher education's infrastructure and intellectual life. Whereas administrators and professors tend to leave vast paper trails, student voices are more difficult to locate in the archives. Historians have also generally focused on broader structural forces affecting students rather than on attitudinal or informational factors. Few historians have probed the significance that student choices, cultural tensions, or family expectations may have had on the growth of higher education. In addition, historians generally have not used the policy lenses of preparation, access, finance, and completion as their central analytical categories for understanding higher education. Instead, most historians have organized their work around individual institutions and the categories of race, gender, and class.

The value of historical research for policy-makers is also complicated by the discipline's humanistic aspects. While historical research aspires to be scientific by citing data that is "reproducible" and applicable to similar circumstances, historians also often emphasize the particularity of their subject matter (Shavelson, 2002). Historical research on college access, for example, often focuses on specific campuses without exploring connections with broader principles of higher education (Mattingly et al, 2004). Even when historians ask questions about a single campus, they typically provide ambiguous findings. In fact, scholarship that reveals ambiguity and subtlety is often more respected by the historical profession than work that yields clear-cut "lessons." In general, historians are trained to produce histories of policy rather than histories as policy. According to John Rury (1999), the discipline's interest in exploring unanswerable questions and moral dimensions may make the historian "closer to the philosopher than to the policy analyst." Historians seeking to produce work that might be relevant to policy-makers often find themselves caught between these conflicting frameworks (.Donato & Lazerson, 2000; Rury, 1999).

COLLEGE PREPARATION OF WORKING CLASS AND IMMIGRANT STUDENTS 1

With regard to college preparation, historical nuances and ambiguities can be instructive for the politicians, officials, and administrators who shape contemporary higher education. Historical research can inform current policy discussions by demonstrating that the division between secondary and higher education has always been blurry. Institutions of higher education have almost always been compelled to take some responsibility for college preparation. Since access to public high schools was not widely available in the nineteenth century, most students seeking entrance to higher education relied upon private academies or tutors. The relatively small number of public high schools which did manage to provide high quality pre-college training primarily served a small and affluent constituency. Since colleges maintained a variety of different entrance requirements and examination formats, even graduates of these high schools were not necessarily prepared to enter the college of their choice. Even though nineteenth-century colleges enrolled a relatively small portion of the population, most still struggled to identify sufficient numbers of adequately prepared students. Many colleges invested heavily in remedial education in order to increase their pool of students. Schools routinely issued conditional acceptances to students who were not proficient in one or two subjects and then provided basic non-credit coursework in these areas. In order to meet this need, most colleges formed their own academies and preparatory departments. Enrollment in these departments often matched or surpassed enrollment in standard college courses. While institutions of higher education generally regarded these programs as necessary evils and dismantled them as soon as possible, this history challenges contemporary notions that gaps between secondary and higher education are not primarily the responsibility of colleges and universities (Brier, 1984; Labaree, 1988; Reese, 1995; Wechsler, 1977).

By the 1880s, public high school enrollment in the north had surpassed enrollment in private academies. As a result of its lower population density, the disruption of the Civil War, and elite opposition to broad educational opportunity, public high schools grew more slowly in the South. In all regions of the nation, however, many colleges sought to increase the quality and quantity of applicants from the expanding public school system by guaranteeing admission to graduates of high schools that had been certified by states or regional accreditation agencies. However, as large numbers of previously underrepresented students entered secondary education during the twentieth century, education professionals tended to reduce the academic content of curricula for all students except those in explicitly college preparatory tracks. Since high schools tended to guide working-class students and students of color into less academic tracks, the demographics of students prepared for college did not radically change despite increasing numbers of high school graduates. During the era of rapid immigration around the turn of the twentieth century, some immigrants formed private or parochial schools in order to reduce the likelihood of academic or religious discrimination, while others fought to make the public schools more responsive to their interests.

While high school graduation rates have remained under fifty percent for most of U.S. history, educators expressed relatively little concern about secondary school attrition until the 1960s. Over the past several decades, however, concern over the "dropout" problem has become widespread. Until recently, educators have tended to blame students for their academic failure rather than institutional policy or structural forces. Yet dropout prevention programs and the development of the General Education Diploma (GED) have generally failed to significantly increase retention rates. Despite the inequity of secondary education, once colleges have become able to attract enough students, they have generally made fewer interventions into the preparation of potential applicants or the remediation of students with weaker academic skills (Angus, 1999; Brumberg, 1986; Deschenes, Cuban, & Tyack, 2001; Dorn, 1997; Fass, 1989; Labaree, 1988; Perlman, 1988; Peterson, 1985; Reese, 1986, 1995; Wechsler, 1977). Historians have not yet adequately addressed the question of why inequities in preparation persisted even after the formal ideologies supporting inequality had been rejected. Although it seems unlikely that historians will discover any smoking guns, additional historical research might help to illuminate the influence of structural factors, such as institutional diversity and suburbanization, and cultural factors, such as teacher expectations and prejudices.

COLLEGE PREPARATION OF FEMALE STUDENTS

Although women are no longer underrepresented in higher education, the history of this transition may help scholars to better understand the experiences of other populations.2 For example, the history of the education of young women illustrates the extent to which preparation may be a necessary precondition for the expansion of college access. In particular, antebellum female academies with rigorous academic curricula lay the foundation for the growth of women's colleges in the Gilded Age. This history also highlights the manner in which dominant ideologies can work to expand or restrict access to schooling. While White girls were generally not viewed as equal in ability with White boys, a significant amount of education was seen as consistent with prevailing nineteenth-century ideas about White gender roles. According to the discourse of republican motherhood, education was necessary to prepare White girls for their future duties as mothers and wives in a democratic society. In contrast, beyond a small degree of religious literacy, the education of Black Americans was more likely to be viewed as an assault on prevailing notions of nineteenth-century notions of racial hierarchy. Additionally, the history of girls' education underscores the significance of social class. Girls from affluent families have tended to be at the forefront of breaking through sex barriers in education.

Although most founders of public high schools were not interested in educating young women and some single-sex high schools remained along the northeastern seaboard and in the South, public high schools rapidly became coeducational. High school curricula in the nineteenth century were generally not differentiated by gender and young women tended to outnumber and outperform young men. In the early twentieth century, however, curricula became increasingly gendered as schools added vocational courses specifically intended for boys and home economics courses intended for girls. By the 1920s, boys began to outnumber girls in math and science classes while girls were overrepresented in commercial courses such as typing and bookkeeping. Nevertheless, scholars have concluded that these curricular distinctions remained relatively superficial. Even though many educators hoped to differentiate high school curricula by sex, girls and boys generally enrolled in similar proportions of available courses. Despite attempts to increase the retention rates of boys and discourage the academic achievement of girls, young women continued to graduate in higher numbers than young men (Angus, 1999; Beadie, 1993; Graves, 1998; Reese, 1995; Schwager, 1987; Tyack, & Hansot, , 1992).

COLLEGE PREPARATION OF AFRICAN-AMERICAN STUDENTS

Research on the primary and secondary school experiences of African-Americans may represent the most powerful example of the policy relevance of historical scholarship. Historians of education have thoroughly documented the twists and turns of school segregation and have begun to explore the implications of these findings.

In the first half the nineteenth century, some free Black students enrolled in church-affiliated schools or public high schools in the north. However, northern Whites demonstrated little formal commitment to equal educational access and many northern schools excluded African-Americans altogether. A few Black communities were able to sustain African Free Schools, but they typically did not prepare students for higher education. Some Black and White abolitionists advocated for the integration of northern schools. Although many northern states outlawed segregation by the late nineteenth century, local prejudice and residential segregation generally obstructed the implementation of these laws. Since school integration tended to entail the dismissal of all Black teachers as well as the grouping of Black students in separate classrooms within White schools, African-Americans did not always mount vigorous protests against segregation. Formal schooling for African-Americans was prohibited in most southern states for free and enslaved African-Americans alike. Nevertheless, as many as five percent of enslaved persons may have obtained literacy by 1860. During Reconstruction, African-American communities and northern philanthropists established schools throughout the South. Primary schools rapidly increased literacy while academies prepared African-Americans to enter new public and private institutions of Black higher education (Durham, 2003; Homel, 1984; Reese, 1995; Tyack & Lowe, 1986).

With powerful implications for contemporary school policy, historians have been debating the extent to which these segregated schools prepared students for higher education between 1900 and 1970. Many historians have argued that despite the heroic efforts of Black educators, Black schools in both the north and the south were severely hamstrung by discrimination and unequal resources (Anyon, 1997; Dentler & Willie, 1991; Patterson, 2001; Pratt, 1992; Valencia & San Miguel, Jr., 1988). For example, Anderson (1988) criticizes the triumph of the "Hampton Model" for secondary vocational school curricula. Anderson argues that White philanthropists developed a second-class system of education by promoting this model contrary to wishes of most African-American students and teachers. While Homel (1984) argues that many of these schools managed to provide relatively equal educations to African-Americans before the 1920s, he concludes that they were crippled by persistent discrimination and economic depression before the onset of the Second World War.

In recent years, however, several historians have begun to challenge this portrait of mid-century Black schools. In particular, Celcelski (1994) and Walker (1996, 2000) both have highlighted the commitment of Black teachers, parents, and administrators as well as the strength of the curriculum and extra-curriculum. While they acknowledge the severely unequal distribution of resources, Celcelski and Walker suggest that segregated schools may have performed more valuable service to Black communities than post-Brown integrated institutions. Since quantitative data is scarce from this period, Cecelski and Walker rely substantially on the perceptions of teachers and administrators. Both historians have acknowledged the limitations of these sources, but they also urge readers to expand their definitions of school quality to include community cohesion and student identity formation. Census data revealing that Black educational attainment surpassed that of Whites in the 1950s among families with similar income levels has also been used to bolster this portrait of effective pre-Brown schooling (Bauman, 1998).

Historians who are enthusiastic about the strength of segregated Black schools tend to be skeptical about the educational benefits of the Brown decision. As a result of school integration, the Black teaching force was decimated as White administrators tended to hire teachers of their own race. It seems likely that the reduction of the numbers of Black teachers had a detrimental impact on African-American academic achievement. Segregated schools may also have been more likely to encourage Black students to prepare for college and professions. Higginbotham (2001) suggests that discriminatory college counseling at predominantly White high schools may have reduced the numbers of Black graduates who moved on to higher education. While she notes that Black students in White high schools may have received a superior academic education, Higginbotham questions whether the social and emotional costs outweighed the benefits of this experience. The backlash to school integration also may have intensified the use of testing and tracking in elementary and secondary schools in order to replace inter-institutional segregation with intra-institutional segregation (Baker, 2001; Hudson & Holmes, 1994).

Although most scholars now acknowledge the setbacks which followed the Brown decision, many still dispute the charge that school integration caused more harm than good (Klarman, 1994; Kluger, 1975, 2004; Patterson, 2001). Although they argue that desegregation improved school quality only between 1966 and 1976 and emphasize that the costs of desegregation were borne disproportionately by African-Americans, Dentler and Willie (1991) still maintain that desegregation has proven to be the most effective plan for large-scale school improvement.

Since many predominantly White colleges in the post-WWII era claimed that it was difficult for them to find enough qualified Black applicants, additional evidence of effective mid-century African-American secondary education would raise important new questions about the dynamics of integration and admissions at selective institutions of higher education. If Black high schools were effectively preparing their graduates for college-level work, it would indicate that racial discrimination and financial obstacles may have been even more significant barriers to the transition to college than has been previously assumed.

COLLEGE PREPARATION OF NATIVE AMERICAN, LATINO/A, AND ASIAN-AMERICAN STUDENTS

Historical scholarship on Native American education has focused most specifically on boarding schools in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Established by private philanthropy or the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), these schools tended to be vocationally oriented and disrespectful of native cultures. Beginning slowly in 1890s, the federal government began to pay local schools that enrolled Native American students. By the 1920s, seventy-five percent of Native American children attended schools. The majority of these students enrolled in local public schools rather than BIA day schools or boarding schools. While ever greater numbers of Native Americans enrolled in schools, student retention rates remained low as students experienced great difficulty reconciling their schooling with the economics and culture of their reservations. In the 1960s, Native American educators began a concerted campaign for community control, bicultural education, and a greater emphasis on college preparation. While the cultural and political success of the community control movement is clear, these schools continued to face financial and academic challenges (Adams, 1995; Lomawaima, 1994; Mihesuah, 1993; Riney, 1998; Szasz, 1974, 1999; Trennert Jr., 1988).

Substantial research has also been conducted on the segregation and stratification of schooling for Chicanos/as. Most of this work notes the expansion of high school attendance, but highlights the persistence of cultural and academic bias. Most historians agree that racial segregation served the economic interests of the dominant society. At the same time, however, many Chicano/a parents and educational leaders were more interested in community control and school quality than in integration with Whites. Since historians of education have yet to concentrate on more recent immigration since the reforms of 1965, scholarship on Latino/a education has focused almost exclusively on Chicanos/as (Donato, 1997; Gonzalez, 1990; Salinas, 2000; San Miguel, 1987, 2001; Theobald & Donato, 1990; Valencia & San Miguel, Jr., 1988).

In contrast to scholarship on Native American and Latino/a secondary education, relatively little recent work has been completed on the history of Asian-American secondary education. Tamura (1994) and Morimoto (1997) have provided fine monographs detailing the tensions between acculturation and language maintenance among Japanese-American students in Hawaii and California. Both authors profile the struggle of Nisei students to preserve their cultural identity while joining the American middle class. These efforts were obstructed by Americanization activists who promoted total assimilation and limited educational opportunities for immigrants. James (1987) has also addressed the period of Japanese-American education within the concentration camps of the Second World War. Each of these works on secondary school experiences of Asian-Americans focus on Japanese-Americans. We know even less about the educational experiences of other early Asian immigrant populations, such as Filipino-Americans and Chinese-Americans. Given the rise of the term "non-Asian minorities," it is especially important to compare and contrast Asian-American experiences with other ethnic minority populations in terms of educational issues such as biculturalism, community control, and integration.

COLLEGE ACCESS FOR WOMEN STUDENTS

Women were the first underrepresented population to gain access to college in substantial numbers, and this transition has been thoroughly documented by historians. With the exception of a few female seminaries, antebellum institutions of higher education generally did not provide equal educational opportunity for women students. During the second half of the nineteenth century, however, elite women's colleges offering high quality academic training were founded across the nation. Many graduates of these institutions remained single and pursued careers in fields such as health and education.

Although a substantial number of private male colleges became coeducational in the late nineteenth century, these transitions were generally motivated by economic pressure or a desire to replace a fraction of weak male students. While most leaders in the women's rights movement regarded coeducation as a crucial step on the road to social and economic equality, opposition to coeducation remained widespread. Many public intellectuals predicted that coeducation would blur essential boundaries between the sexes and weaken the moral and religious fabric of the nation. Some professors and administrators also worried about the "feminization" of subjects when women began to outnumber men in some courses. Others worried about impending "race suicide" due to the lower marriage rates of female college graduates.

While many public land grant institutions initially resisted coeducation, most normal schools and state universities in the north and west admitted women by the 1870s in response to sustained pressure by aspiring women scholars. Southern states were slower to become coeducational, and, following the example set by Mississippi, often opted to found public women's colleges instead. Public and private colleges alike tended to differentiate their curricula and treat female students as second-class citizens well into the twentieth century. Despite this chilly reception, women students and scholars worked to broaden their access to academic departments at coeducational schools and to establish their own institutional space in programs such as Home Economics. This discipline, which remained linked to traditional gender roles yet provided new professional status for many female scholars, illustrated the complexity of women's early access to higher education. Opposition to women's professional and graduate training also remained widespread. Although many medical schools became coeducational in the late nineteenth century, female enrollment actually decreased as the doctors increasingly emphasized gendered definitions of professional expertise. A late nineteenth-century California court case outlawing discrimination against women in law school admissions marked the start of a trend towards equal access to professional education, and a significant increase in women's participation in Ph.D. programs occurred during the 1920s and 1930s (Bordin, 1999; Duffy & Goldberg, 1998; Gordon, 1990; Langdon, 2001; Lasser, 1987; Miller-Bernal, 1999; Nerad, 1999; Schwager, 1987; Solomon, 1985; Tyack & Hansot, 1992).

Beginning with the rush of predominantly male veterans onto college campuses after the Second World War, women's proportional gains in higher education stalled. By the 1960s, though, women resumed their increase in access to all levels of advanced schooling. During the 1960s and 1970s, a second wave of college conversions to coeducation was motivated by a familiar mix of financial pressures and desires to raise admissions selectivity. In the decade of the 1960s alone, the number of women's colleges decreased by half. Many former men's colleges also went coed, though some retained female quotas. Between 1966 and 1986, the proportion of single-sex colleges decreased from twenty five to six percent of the total number of institutions of higher learning. By 1980, only two percent of women attending college were enrolled in single-sex schools. Although unevenly enforced, the 1972 Title IX amendment to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 banned gender discrimination of any kind in schools receiving federal funding and has since been employed to attack inequality particularly in the realm of college athletics. Women's college enrollment rapidly increased and surpassed male enrollment in 1979. By the 1980s, studies of young women revealed that their professional and educational aspirations equaled or surpassed those of young men. However, women remained underrepresented in professional schools in fields such as law and medicine (Duffy & Goldberg, 1998; Solomon, 1985; Tyack & Hansot, 1992).

Although the historiography of women's access to college is incredibly rich, scholars of gender and higher education have tended to focus on the initial barriers to admission, curricular inequity and assets, and student culture. Relatively little historical work has analyzed the relationships between gender and socioeconomic status on college campuses. For example, Solomon (1985) briefly notes that more scholarship money was available for men than for women at the turn of the century. She also argues that the population of college women diversified in this same period Vandenberg-Daves (2001) has stated that working-class women began to attend college in the same proportions as affluent women sometime between the 1960s and the 1980s, and that their achievements challenged patriarchy as much as the better publicized women's rights movement of this era. How might additional research into the intersection of gender and class complicate our understanding of college access and retention?

COLLEGE ACCESS FOR WORKING-CLASS AND IMMIGRANT STUDENTS

Although the broad timeline of the transition to college for working-class youth has been established, this area has not received sufficient attention in recent years. For the past fifteen years, historians of higher education have paid more attention to race and gender than to class (Nidiffer, 1999). Yet, class remains an important area for further research especially in light of proposals to reconsider the criteria for affirmative action.

Burke (1982) and Allmendinger (1975) have demonstrated that the nineteenth-century college population was not entirely homogenous, while Herbst (1989) and Ogren (2005) have argued that normal schools were the first providers of mass higher education. Nevertheless, relatively few working-class or immigrant youth attended college during this era. While any student who could pass a series of entrance examinations could enroll in college, tuition and the scarcity of quality public secondary schooling were formidable hurdles throughout the century. In particular, college entrance exams in Latin and Greek excluded large numbers of students whose high schools did not offer adequate instruction in these subjects (Duffy & Goldberg, 1998; Jarausch, 1983; Leslie, 1992; Synnott, 1979; Wechsler, 1977).

Between the First and Second World Wars, rising rates of high school graduation and increasing employer interest in college credentials translated into a dramatic expansion of the number of college applicants. Most east coast colleges responded to this increase by raising their admissions requirements and becoming increasingly selective. Admissions officers began to consult standardize test scores and grade point averages in order to determine applicants' eligibility. However, non-academic variables were also considered and often relied upon in order to reduce the numbers of Jewish and working-class students who were beginning to matriculate in large numbers. Many contemporary and subjective elements of the college admissions process originated in this period, such as interviews, letters of recommendations, and essay questions. On campus, ethnic and working-class students were often excluded from fraternities and other campus activities and tended to form their own extracurricular communities. By the 1930s, it was not uncommon for selective colleges to enforce specific quotas in order to limit the enrollment of Jewish students (Greenberg & Zenchelsky, 1993; Horowitz, 1987; Lemann, 1999; Markowitz, 1990; Oren, 1985; Synnott, 1979; Wechsler, 1977, 1984).

At this time, private Catholic colleges were important sites for the higher education of students who desired to maintain their culture or who were unable to attend other institutions. DePaul University, for example, enrolled large numbers of students from families of modest means (Rury, 1997). Yet, there has been little systematic research into the impact of Catholic institutions on underrepresented populations' transition to college or social mobility. Gleason (1995), Leahy (1991), and Gallin (2000) have written the institutional, intellectual, and cultural histories of Catholic higher education. Yet, none of these authors primarily concentrate on student socioeconomic status. Since some scholars have suggested that parochial secondary schools might provide a model for effective urban education, the dearth of research on the egalitarian aspects of Catholic higher education is somewhat surprising.

Historians have also paid insufficient attention to how institutions of public higher education responded to the increasing demand for college during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Most studies repeat the conventional wisdom that public and land grant universities, especially in the Midwest and West, offered vocationally-oriented curricula to a somewhat broader range of students. In contrast, private universities focused on providing liberal arts education to small numbers of elite students and valued their independence from external social and economic forces. Yet, by the 1920s, some state flagship universities such as Michigan and Minnesota debated whether they should imitate selective private schools or continue to focus on the education of the largest possible number of high school graduates. Dennis (2001) suggests that administrators of southern public universities tempered their interest in selective admissions in order serve a broader segment of state residents. In contrast, Levine (1986) argues that state universities generally emulated private schools, charged increasingly high fees, and did not educate significantly numbers of students from previously underrepresented populations. While the University of California pledged to expand access to higher education beyond the privileged classes, poor students were never proportionately represented at the state's flagship campuses in Berkeley and Los Angeles. In the case of Massachusetts, Freeland (1992) agrees that the state's Amherst campus contributed little to the cause of educational opportunity (Douglass, 2000; Jewell, 2000; Wechsler, 1977).

While private colleges were free to limit their enrollments, public systems of higher education could be pressured to accommodate larger numbers of students. Skeptical of the ability and the commitment of the majority of high school graduates, most state administrators responded to higher demands for higher education by sorting students into a variety of educational settings, ranging from two-year community colleges to four-year state colleges and universities. Most states devoted substantial resources to flagship campuses while the majority of students from previously underrepresented working-class populations enrolled in two-year or regional colleges. While most states lacked the level of coordination embodied by California's 1960 "Master Plan," most regional state colleges, which generally evolved out of public normal schools, encountered administrative or legislative opposition whenever they sought to duplicate academic programs offered by flagship universities. When public and private schools occupied the same locale, similar sorts of stratification has occurred. In New York City, for example, Columbia University staked out a position at the top of the region's higher education hierarchy and relied upon nearby public colleges to ease political pressure by accommodating the large numbers of aspiring students which Columbia excluded. While schools such as City College and New York University could provide high quality education, their graduates had less access to power and prestige (Bender, 1987; Glazer, 1988; Jarausch, 1983; Levine, 1986; Link, 1995; Wechsler, 1977).

Scholars specializing in two-year community colleges have made important contributions to this analysis of institutional stratification. Established in the early twentieth century, these colleges were charged with a dual mission: to provide vocational training for high school graduates who were uninterested or unable to earn a bachelor's degree, and supply the general education necessary to enable students to transfer to four-year colleges. Brint and Karabel (1989) argue that community colleges have tended to gravitate from liberal arts to vocational courses, thereby decreasing students' opportunities to complete their bachelor's degrees at four-year colleges. Similarly, Frye (1992) argues that the national proponents of two-year colleges promoted occupational training while most students and local boosters were more interested in liberal arts curricula. Dougherty (2001) stakes out a middle ground between the proponents and critics of community colleges. He asserts that community colleges increased access to education, but ultimately reduced enrollments in four-year colleges. Dougherty also argues that the efficacy of two-year vocational programs has been more complicated than its critics and champions have been willing to acknowledge. Especially since community colleges have accounted for nearly half of all enrollments in institutions of higher education since the Second World War, additional research is required to better test generalizations about the extent to which they have satisfied the aspirations of their students. Further studies of this question might also help to clarify the extent to which the concentration of working-class students in two-year colleges was a product of public policy, financial constraints, or student choice.

Following the Second World War, the scale and speed of the increase in college enrollment was unprecedented. Initially, most scholars believed that the G. I. Bill dramatically helped to redefine the collegiate population by introducing large proportions of working-class students. Olson (1974), however, notes that the soldiers who were most likely to benefit from the G. I. Bill were veterans who already had financial resources. Olson estimates that the majority of recipients could have paid their college tuition without the government's assistance before the war. Although it seems certain that the G. I. Bill was instrumental in enlarging administrators' and policy-makers' sense of the college-going percentage of the population, it is less clear whether the late 1940s were a watershed in terms of working-class access to college (Bennett, 1996; Clark, 1998). Scholars do agree that anti-Semitism in higher education subsided after the Second World War as result of the reaction against Nazism, the contributions of Jewish veterans and refugees, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Oren, 1985; Synnott, 1979).

At the highest levels of administration, a crucial reexamination of higher education had occurred by the late 1940s. Debates over who should go to college and why had been intensifying since the First World War. A cohort of university presidents, including Lotus Coffman of Minnesota and George Zook of Akron, lobbied for the development of institutions of mass higher education that might balance utilitarian curricula and traditional forms of liberal arts. These administrators believed that colleges could introduce a broad swath of American youth to the virtues of what Coffman called "intelligent followership." Other prominent figures in higher education, such as Robert Hutchins, continued to argue that college education should remain selective and focused on pure academic pursuits. Eventually, the Truman administration endorsed the concept of mass higher education. Chaired by Zook, a Presidential Commission on Higher Education recommended that forty-nine percent of 18–21 year olds could benefit from some form of college. Since less than sixteen percent of this age group attended college in 1940, this report endorsed not only an expansive definition of higher education, but also an emerging confidence in the intellectual capabilities of the American population (Levine, 1986). Freeland (1992) attributes this radical shift to the growth of bureaucracy and technology in the workplace combined with the emergence of democratic ideology in the wartime and postwar period.

By the 1960s, a period of economic growth and civil rights activism, the notion of "universal" higher education regardless of social class was first promulgated as a national goal. College enrollment more than doubled during the 1960s, reaching a total of 7.9 million students. The value of a college credential in the bureaucracies of both the public and private sectors helped per-capita enrollment rise to a new peak in 1975. While financial need continued to prevent many working-class high school graduates from attending college, overtly discriminatory admissions policies decreased. However, an increasing prestige gap between schools during this period of expanding enrollments may have exacerbated existing gulfs between haves and have-nots. Freeland (1992) argues that a postwar "golden age" of government funding may have increased the stratification of higher education by dramatically increasing the resources of elite universities. In addition, leaders of American higher education may have prioritized competition for institutional prestige over attention to access. On the other side of the prestige spectrum, enrollments in community colleges and public colleges have expanded rapidly in the past fifty years. Whereas enrollments in public and private institutions were nearly equivalent in 1950, the public sector of higher education enrolled three-quarters of all students by 1970 (Duffy & Goldberg, 1998; Grobman, 1988).

As the baby boom ebbed, colleges vied with each other to fill seats during the 1970s and 1980s. Competition with neighboring institutions encouraged elite colleges to bolster their images by reducing their class sizes and increasing their selectivity. In this atmosphere, colleges' average SAT scores became a public indication of college rank and helped to illustrate the growth of a substantial gap between selective and non-selective colleges (Duffy & Goldberg, 1998; Freeland, 1992). Some historians have argued that this dramatic stratification among institutions of higher education has betrayed the promise of democratic education throughout the twentieth century. While enrollments in colleges and universities expanded, increasing inter- and intra-institutional stratification may have preserved the status of students in prestigious programs and denied equal opportunity to working-class students who were most likely to enroll in less selective schools. While most historians who have written about college access have been critical of this trend towards greater institutional stratification, some scholars have come to its defense. Kabaservice (2001) and Douglass (2000), for example, argue that scientific research and academic quality at elite schools depend on selective admissions and high levels of state funding. While noting that Minnesotans protested against a proposal to limit access to the state's Twin Cities campus in the 1980s, Vandenberg-Daves (2003) has argued that rural residents were more interested in founding local public colleges from the 1950s through the 1970s. Further research is needed to sharpen our understanding of the social costs and benefits of institutional stratification. For example, to what extent were low-status institutions such as normal schools, agricultural schools, and community colleges effective means of expanding educational opportunity? To what extent did this institutional differentiation obstruct or otherwise mediate the increase in access to higher education for working-class students?

COLLEGE ACCESS FOR AFRICAN-AMERICAN STUDENTS

Similarly, historians are still in the process of exploring the implications of racial segregation in higher education. In the antebellum era, a small number of African-Americans graduated from northern and mid-western institutions of higher education. Although most antebellum colleges and universities did not maintain formal racial barriers, limited secondary schooling and financial constraints functioned as de facto restrictions on the number of Black applicants (Duffy & Goldberg, 1998; Jewell, 2000; Waite, 2002). Between the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement, few Black students graduated from predominantly White colleges and institutions. Perkins concludes that the handful of affluent Black women at the Seven Sister Colleges encountered a relatively tolerant environment and proceeded to successful professional careers. For the most part, however, segregated colleges founded during Reconstruction were the only opportunity for African-Americans to pursue higher education during this period. Most of these historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) were founded by White missionaries or philanthropists and generally came under Black leadership during the first half of twentieth century (Anderson, 1988; Drewry & Doermann, 2001; Levine, 1986; Lucas, 1994; Perkins, 1997).

Although Black college enrollment increased steadily, only one percent of Black Americans had gone to college by 1940 compared to five percent of White Americans. The Second World War provided some increase in access to higher education as Black soldiers took advantage of educational opportunities provided by the military. However, many Black veterans did not have enough academic preparation to qualify for the scholarships provided by the G. I. Bill. In addition, thousands of Black veterans who possessed high school diplomas were still unable to find a space at overflowing HBCUs. Furthermore, Black veterans who graduated from segregated institutions of higher education enjoyed relatively modest economic benefit from their degrees (Cohen, 2003; Fass, 1989; Levine, 1986; Turner & Bound, 2003).

Debate over the academic quality of HBCUs has been as extensive as disagreements over the quality of segregated secondary schools. Many historians have described the small budgets of most HBCUs and celebrated the movements to integrate White flagship universities in southern states such as Alabama and Mississippi (Levine, 1986; Pratt, 2002; Sansig, 1990). Scholars have also noted that the White philanthropists who supported the founding of Black colleges typically promoted vocational training instead of programs in the liberal arts. Yet, Wolters (1975) and Anderson (1988) argue that Black college students rebelled against this paternalism and worked to increase offerings in traditional academic and professional subjects. Even more enthusiastic, Drewry and Doermann (2001) conclude that private HBCUs promoted the growth of the African-American middle class. They also note that only half of the private HBCUs established between 1900 and 1915 were primarily focused on agricultural or vocational subjects. While Drewry and Doermann acknowledge that HBCUs had less money, fewer credentialed faculty, and lower standardized test scores, they argue that these schools served as invaluable sources of cultural pride and excelled at providing higher education to students with weak secondary schooling. They also assert that HBCUs successfully trained several generations of Black professional leaders and cultivated a lifelong commitment to community service amongst graduates. In contrast to the standard narrative of integration, some Black leaders, such as Kentucky State's Rufus King, sought increased funding for HBCUs as alternative to integration (Smith, 1994). Shabazz (2004) illustrates a similar conflict in Texas and highlights the persistence of racism in predominantly White colleges and universities (PWCUs) after integration.

African-American college enrollments grew substantially beginning in the mid-1950s, and by the 1970s, half of Black college students were attending PWCUs. Although a few predominantly White colleges voluntarily desegregated, outside pressure was generally required in order to expand access to African-American students. Most segregated public systems of higher education sought to resist federal authority through policies of passive resistance. It seems clear that consistent pressure from the national government was necessary to compel the gradual desegregation of state universities. Even though there were small gains during the late 1950s and early 1960s, significant increases in African-American access to higher education did not occur until after the implementation and enforcement of civil rights legislation such as the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the Higher Education Act of 1965, and the Equal Opportunity Program (EOP) (Cross & Slater, 1999;Synnott, 1989). Rebutting recent doubts about the government's ability to promote integration, Williams (1997) attributes the persistence of low Black enrollment to the weak and inconsistent enforcement of these laws. Williams notes that there were no specific federal guidelines for the desegregation of higher education until 1977. Federal officials also tended to evaluate state processes, rather than discrete outcomes or timetables for increasing Black enrollments. In Georgia, for example, state resistance and litigation delayed the implementation of substantial desegregation measures until 1982. Instead of adopting structural changes such as merging academic departments of neighboring segregated colleges or increasing funding for retention programs, Georgia managed to appease federal authorities by initiating relatively superficial recruitment programs.

Beginning in the early 1960s, many northern and western colleges initiated their own programs designed to increase access to African-Americans. Summer enrichment, upward bound, and scholarships achieved only modest success at elite liberal arts colleges. By 1968, despite relative gains in enrollment, Black students still represented a disproportionately small percentage of the student body at most PWCUs. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, many colleges took additional steps to overcome the financial and academic obstacles to integration. Colleges expanded their admissions criteria, increased financial aid, made recruiting trips to predominantly Black high schools, and instituted remedial education programs (Duffy & Goldberg, 1998; Higginbotham, 2001). Several schools experimented with more radical policies. Rutgers accepted applicants who scored over 400 on the SAT verbal and ranked in the top half of their high school class. Rutgers also instituted the Urban University Program, a non-credit remedial school designed to serve as a bridge to regular undergraduate status. This program, however, struggled to achieve its goals and was eventually scaled back and subsumed by a less ambitious equal-opportunity program (McCormick, 1990). The City University of New York (CUNY) made the most dramatic efforts to increase minority enrollments. CUNY experimented with programs to enroll disadvantaged high school graduates and adopted a policy of open admissions in 1970. Although CUNY's open admissions era has attracted much attention from historians, they remain divided over the efficacy of this policy. Traub (1994) notes CUNY's dropping graduation rates and academic performance, although he is more cautiously enthusiastic about ESL programs and pockets of high-level academic achievement in engineering and the liberal arts.

According to Reuben (2001), these programs for increasing the enrollments of African-American students were always vulnerable to criticism. Instead of redefining their definitions of student merit or rearticulating the social mission of higher education, university and college administrators had justified minority recruitment in the traditional terms of a national search for talented youth. These recruitment programs were always susceptible to charges of reverse-discrimination because administrators never reconciled their stated goals of locating talented students of color with their policies of altering academic requirements. Increasing attention to standardized tests, proposals for open admissions, and the need for academic remediation put most recruitment programs on the defensive. Administrators might have avoided these conflicts either by redefining student merit in a more inclusive fashion or by acknowledging and seeking to reform blatant inequalities in secondary and elementary education.3

The patchwork of policies designed to increase access to higher education was very effective for a small number of academically successful and predominantly middle class African-American students. However, access to high-status institutions of higher education remained out of reach for a large proportion of Black students. Increasing selectivity at the top tier of colleges and universities has worked at cross purposes with the goal of achieving equal access to higher education. In addition, increasing reliance on standardized testing may have widened the gap between advantaged and disadvantaged African-Americans. After 1975, political momentum ebbed and Black enrollment in colleges and universities actually declined despite the fact that high school graduation rates remained constant. Disproportionate numbers of African-American students continued to enroll in unselective institutions. Backlash against earlier policies pressured higher-status colleges and universities to limit their recruitment of students of color to a limited pool of high-scoring candidates. By the 1990s, the most radical policies, such as those implemented at CUNY and the University of California, were scaled back or rejected altogether (Baker, 2001; Duffy & Goldberg, 1998; Jewell, 2000; Karen, 1991; Reuben, 2001).

COLLEGE ACCESS FOR NATIVE AMERICAN, LATINO/A, AND ASIAN-AMERICAN STUDENTS

While the history of Native American boarding schools has been well documented, Native American access to higher education still awaits thorough historical treatment. After unsuccessful experiments at Harvard College and Henrico College in the seventeenth century, a small number of Native Americans gained access to college during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Some attended HBCUs such as the Hampton Institute, while others attended PWCUs. Most White reformers and policy-makers in the nineteenth century opposed the formation of separate tribal colleges because they believed that all Indians should assimilate into White culture.4 As late as the early 1930s, only a few hundred Native American students attended college. The 1960s and 1970s, however, were decades of substantial growth for Native American higher education. The Higher Education Act of 1965 provided federal funding to colleges sponsored by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). Many BIA boarding schools were converted into junior colleges, shifting the BIA's emphasis from secondary vocational training to post-secondary vocational training. In 1968, the Navajo Community College (later renamed Diné College) became the first college founded and controlled entirely by tribal authorities. Inspired by schools such as Diné, the Indian Education Act of 1972 authorized federal funding for Native American community colleges and facilitated the spread of these autonomous institutions of higher education. Private foundations also began to make substantial contributions. Still, tribal colleges have generally not provided four years of higher education. In 1997, 27 out of 30 American tribal colleges were two-year programs with emphases on cultural preservation and vocational preparation. Native American college attendance has grown consistently since the 1970s and represented almost one percent of total student enrollment by the mid-1990s (Szasz, 1974, 1999; Wollock, 1997).

Research on early Latino/a and Asian-American enrollment in college has been hampered by the fact that most institutions did not keep data on students representing these underrepresented populations prior to the 1980s. Nevertheless, it seems clear that Latinos/as benefited from federal policies such as the Higher Education Act of 1965 and the Educational Opportunities Program. During the 1980s, despite persistent discrimination in the arena of secondary schooling, Latino/a enrollment in colleges and universities doubled (Bernal, 1999, MacDonald & García, 2003). Between the conclusion of the Spanish-American War and the 1930s, small numbers of Filipino students sought professional credentials from American colleges. Although most of these students intended to return to the Philippines after graduation, many were unable to work their way through college and formed a permanent Filipino-American community. During the Second World War, thousands of Nisei students left the concentration camps and attended college. In the 1960s and 1970s, Asian-American students gained visibility in institutions of higher education by joining protests for civil rights, ethnic studies, and admissions reform. Although Asian-American academic achievement has been subjected to a great deal of stereotyping, Asian-Americans have become well represented at many elite American colleges and universities. By 1984, for example, the University of California no longer considered Asian-Americans to be an underrepresented population. Activists have suspected that some schools initiated unofficial quotas in order to limit Asian-American enrollment. Despite the relative success of Asian-American students as a whole, certain ethnic communities remain underrepresented in higher education (Lemann, 1999; Okihiro, 1999; Posadas & Guyotte, 1990).

FINANCING POSTSECONDARY SCHOOLING

Although colleges have granted scholarships, especially for students training for Protestant ministries, since the earliest era of American higher education, formal financial aid programs did not proliferate until the end of the nineteenth century. However, many public universities charged little or no tuition. Still, subsistence expenses and opportunity costs remained serious barriers to college for students with modest means. Private colleges and universities began to offer merit scholarships in order to attract academically gifted students who had limited means or who hailed from faraway regions. By the Second World War, institutions also offered need-based aid, motivated in part by concerns that admissions solely based on academic merit would erode schools' extracurricular vitality. By the 1960s, the College Board helped to reduce competition between schools by standardizing the formula used to calculate student need.

During the 1930s, the federal government began providing financial aid for the first time. The National Youth Administration provided grants and work study opportunities to students across the country (Bower, 2004). In addition, the Indian Reorganization Act included a loan program that served 1,900 Native American students between 1935 and 1944. In 1948, after it had become clear that debt-burdened recipients were dropping out in relatively high proportions, these loans evolved into cash grants (Szasz, 1974, 1999; Wollock, 1997). The G. I. Bill provided financial aid for higher education on an unprecedented scale in the years following the Second World War, while the National Defense and Education Act of 1958 offered loans to gifted students interested in studying science or foreign languages. The Higher Education Act of 1965 provided the first federal source of need-based funding. A component of the Johnson administration's War on Poverty, this act authorized tuition grants, low-interest loans, and federal work-study opportunities.

Despite this new source of government assistance, most institutions could not afford to provide sufficient financial aid for all qualified applicants. Since it had become socially unpalatable to reject a portion of applicants solely because of their financial status, many schools adopted "admit/deny" policies which admitted qualified students regardless of need, but denied financial aid to students whose grades, scores, and applications fell below certain cutoff points. Need-based federal financial aid was eventually boosted by the Pell Grant provision of the Higher Education Act of 1972. Nevertheless, the available aid was still not sufficient to equalize access to higher education. The proportions of poor high school graduates attending college remained significantly lower than the enrollment rates of wealthy high school graduates. Since 1961, college enrollment rates for low-income students with high academic achievement have remained close to sixty percent. Family income levels have also continued to correlate to the type of institution that students attend (Duffy & Goldberg, 1998; McPherson & Schapiro, 2001; Wilkerson, 2001; Wollock, 1997).

The early 1970s were the peak era of per-capita financial aid targeted to students from previously underrepresented populations. During this period, politicians began to express concern about a "middle income squeeze" of college financing. As a result, the federal government recalibrated Pell grants in order to provide more funding for middle-class students and for private college tuition. Individual schools and the College Board also relaxed their financial aid formulas. As a result, a larger proportion of funding began to flow towards populations who were already well represented in institutions of higher education. Rising costs during the 1980s and 1990s also served to decrease the proportions of tuition typically covered by federal and state aid. Federal financial aid appropriations decreased during the 1980s and student loans became larger components of financial aid packages as colleges were generally unable to pick up the slack. As a result, working-class youth have become less likely to attend prestigious institutions over the course of the past few decades. Working-class African-Americans may have suffered from the decline in student aid more than working-class Whites. One study concluded that college enrollment of low-income Black students fell twenty-nine percent between 1979 and 1984, while enrollments of low-income White students remained constant. In general, working-class students have been unable to organize as a distinct interest group in order to pressure politicians and university administrators to reverse these trends (Duffy & Goldberg, 1998; Harcleroad & Ostar, 1987; Karen, 1991; McPherson & Schapiro, 2001; Wilkerson, 2001).

The rise of merit-based financial aid constitutes another significant historical trend. As schools competed for high-achieving students during a post-baby boom slump in college-aged youth, merit-based aid began to rival need-based aid as the main form of financial assistance. Awarded disproportionately to affluent students, merit aid packages do not appear to have been an effective means of increasing the enrollment of students from underrepresented populations. Once on the cutting edge of egalitarian reforms of access to higher education, admissions committees evolved into offices of "enrollment management" that balanced competing demands for diversity, tuition, and institutional prestige. In this climate, financial aid was more likely to be regarded as a tool to build a desirable freshman class instead of as a mechanism for achieving social justice. The extent to which increases in merit-based aid may or may not have impacted the availability of need-based aid or the enrollment of students from underrepresented populations is not yet clear (Duffy & Goldberg, 1998; McPherson & Schapiro, 2001; Wilkerson, 2001). Duffy and Goldberg (1998) have suggested, for instance, that the relationship between merit-based and need-based aid was not necessarily zero-sum. They also speculate that merit-aid may have been necessary for ensuring academic quality and institutional survival in a competitive marketplace.

Perhaps because the quantitative nature of financial aid seems to mesh more directly with other social science disciplines such as economics, there has been a lack of historical research on this topic. Nevertheless, historians can deepen their examination of the political debates and discussions of college mission which informed financial aid policy. Historians can also evaluate the relationship between the intentions of financial aid and outcomes as measured by other social scientists. Historians can explain the shifting emphases on need-based aid, merit-based aid, and student loans. Has there indeed been a zero-sum game between the various forms of aid? What were the perceived and actual relationships between financial aid, college competitiveness, and academic quality? What was the relationship between public policy and institutional policy?

RETENTION AND OUTCOMES

Higher education generally paid dividends for women graduates. Although their job options were limited and they were typically underpaid for their work, women college graduates became more likely to obtain financial independence. Women with college degrees have always been more likely to work and to remain employed even after marriage or childbirth. At first, the majority of female college graduates became teachers or social workers. During the twentieth century, however, the occupational outcomes of female graduates began to more closely mirror those of male graduates. Perkins has argued that Black women in college during the nineteenth century tended to view higher education as a strategy for "race uplift." In contrast, White women were more likely to approach higher education in order to elevate their traditional domestic roles or to train for a specific vocation. While most Black female graduates could find work as schoolteachers, Black male graduates were more likely to have difficulty finding jobs that required college degrees (Noble, 1988; Perkins, 1983, 1990, 1997; Sicherman, 1988; Vandenberg-Daves, 2001).

Black students attending predominantly White colleges have generally encountered either veiled or overt forms of hostility. Many of these students have reported feelings of social isolation and expressed ambivalence about the value of their sacrifices. While small colleges achieved social integration more quickly, the first Black students at large predominantly White universities tended to remain separate from many extracurricular and social activities. Those students who entered college with unequal academic preparation also found little or no compensatory tutoring programs. This pioneering cohort of students arrived on campus with high expectations and was generally surprised by the lack of respect for their cultural backgrounds. In response to this environment and in concert with a broader movement for Black power, this generation of students worked to create a more welcoming atmosphere on campus. Black fraternities, initially founded in HBCUs, spread to most major research universities and provided valuable support networks. This generation of Black college students advocated for the establishment of Black student unions, cultural centers, Black studies programs, and academic support services. On many campuses, Black student activists made radical demands for more active recruitment and hiring of Black professors, reforms of admissions policies for students of color, and substantial increases in financial aid (Exum, 1985; Higginbotham, 2001; McCormick, 1990; Morris, 1995; Ross Jr., 2000; Williamson, 1999, 2005).

These protest movements forced colleges and universities to weigh their interest in preserving their elite status against their interest in providing equal opportunity. Some of these reforms were achieved, Black enrollments increased, and predominantly White campuses became somewhat more hospitable to Black students. Nevertheless, race relations on campus were still strained and the retention rate for Black college students remained significantly lower than that of Whites. For example, the 1979 graduation rate of students participating in the predominantly-Black Rutgers Equal Opportunity Fund was twenty-seven percent, less than half of the overall Rutgers graduation rate (McCormick, 1990). Drewry and Doermann (2001) suggest that the track records of historically Black colleges compare favorably to predominantly White colleges. They note that, since the 1970s, graduates of HBCUs have been more likely to earn advanced degrees than Black graduates from PWCUs. Despite the persistence of a gap in college retention rates between Black and White students, many scholars argue that this generation of Black college students worked to redefine the meaning of collegiate success. Similar to Perkins' (1983, 1990) discussion of elite nineteenth-century African-American women, they suggest that Black students at PWCUs during the 1960s and 1970s measured success in terms of social and racial justice rather than in purely academic and professional terms.

Compared to the body of historical scholarship addressing the experiences of Black students on predominantly White campuses, very little has been written about other minority groups or White working-class students. The work of social scientists has found that the unselective institutions that enroll disproportionate numbers of students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds have tended to have lower graduation rates in the past few decades (Monkturner, 1995). Yet, historians have not yet explored the extent to which this dynamic also explains earlier patterns of college retention. Historians also do not seem to have been particularly effective at supporting their analysis of college outcomes with available quantitative studies of the economic returns to college. To what extent have lower-status colleges and universities provided quality academic instruction? While historians have debated whether credentials or academics were the driving force behind the expansion of secondary education, no such debate has taken place with regards to higher education. Historians should begin to compare the post-graduation outcomes of students from low- and high-status colleges and universities.

CONCLUSIONS

Given the state of historical research on higher education, scholars should be cautious about drawing definite conclusions about how to best to expand contemporary access to college. This essay has indicated several key areas in which additional research would be required before historians of higher education could be confident about their contributions to public policy. In particular, historians still do not have a sufficient understanding of the extent to which institutional differentiation and stratification has promoted or prevented equal access to higher education. In other areas, however, it is possible to describe some tentative recommendations based on what we know of the past. In terms of preparation, the experience of the nineteenth century suggests that even elite liberal arts colleges can take an active role in providing college preparation while still remaining true to other aspects of their academic mission. While consensus has not been reached about the merits of the most ambitious remedial programs, college resources may have to play a significant role in bridging current gaps between high schools and post-secondary education.

Along with inequalities in preparation, the evolving concept of meritocratic admissions has been another historical barrier to equal access to higher education. Although the increasing interest in "merit" once served to expand access to college by opening admissions to academically skilled but socially or economically marginalized students, it became a hurdle for equal access by the final third of the twentieth century. Standardized test scores have long since ceased to be a means of increasing access to college. Since colleges have struggled to articulate a consistent measurement of student merit, it remains unclear if it is possible to determine a coherent or constructive college mission based on meritocratic principles. History suggests that admissions committees can and should continue to explore ways to reform and expand their definitions of merit. For example, although student test scores were originally conceived as a means of measuring the likelihood of a student's academic success in college, administrators should recognize that scores have been increasingly viewed in aggregate as measurements of institutional quality and prestige.

While the history of financial barriers to college is still somewhat speculative, it is clear that the introduction of need-based aid in the 1960s and 1970s correlated with a dramatic spike in enrollment. However, historians are not certain if this policy was a more important variable than civil rights activism, economic growth, or the cultural impact of the G. I. Bill.

Although the deregulated U.S. system of higher education has been favorably compared to colleges and universities in other industrialized nations, history suggests that equal access may require state action. On occasion, market forces have motivated institutions to expand access to underrepresented populations. The move towards coeducation, in particular, benefited from institutional interest in expanding their pool of potential applicants. However, government intervention has generally been necessary to increase access to college. In addition to specific acts of legislation, such as the Higher Education Act of 1965, state sponsorship of public colleges and universities has been crucial. The public sector of higher education has accommodated the majority of students from underrepresented populations. While skeptics have often questioned the need for additional capacity, history can teach us that experts have routinely underestimated the extent of the demand for higher education by students and employers alike. This simple lesson may be history's most powerful contribution to current conversations about college access.

This manuscript was prepared as part of the Social Science Research Council's Transition to College project. I would especially like to thank Julie Reuben for her guidance throughout the process of researching and writing this paper.

Notes

1 This essay does not provide an exhaustive survey of all historical scholarship on transitions to college. The "Preparation" section, in particular, only discusses work representing broad themes and major debates in the historiography as well as scholarship which touches most directly access to college.

2 It is also important to consider whether gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender students should be considered underrepresented populations during the eras in which these identities were generally suppressed on college campuses. Aside from D'Emilio's preliminary essays about the college experiences of GLBT students, very little historical work has been conducted on this subject (D'Emilio, 1992).

3 Widespread embrace of meritocratic ideals also complicated efforts to increase class heterogeneity in colleges and universities. According to Jencks and Riesman (1969), reliance on standardized tests actually rendered institutions of higher education more stratified by class during the 1960s than during the 1930s and 1940s.

4 The Croatan Normal School in Robeson County, North Carolina is an important exception. Established by act of the North Carolina legislature in 1887 in response to a petition by Lumbee Indians, this school was arguably the first American institution of higher education subject to a substantial degree of Native American governance. This school has evolved into the University of North Carolina at Pembroke. A boarding school founded by Baptist missionaries in the Indian Territories (OK) also evolved into Bacone College by the 1920s (Reyhner & Eder, 2004).

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Cite This Article as: Teachers College Record Volume 109 Number 10, 2007, p. 3-4

http://www.tcrecord.org ID Number: 12566, Date Accessed: 11/6/2006 12:43:51 PM

by Daniel Jacoby — November 09, 2006

This commentary updates Burton Clark's student "cooling out" function by showing that community colleges now also "cool out" aspiring faculty members, by placing them in part-time employment. This new cooling out function results in lower student graduation rates and thus aggravates the original student "cooling out" function posited by Clark.

Nearly 50 years ago, Burton Clark (1960) argued in a highly influential paper that community colleges had been delegated the crucial, if unflattering, function of "cooling out" those students whose ambitions had been overstimulated by the rise of open enrollment policies. Clark suggested that it fell to community colleges to replace students' lofty, but unlikely, aspirations with more achievable goals, perhaps even to push them out the college door altogether. This essay updates Clark's argument by suggesting that the student "cooling out" function is now aggravated by another "cooling out" function that operates with respect to faculty.

Clark's "cooling out" thesis is very controversial among educators (Dougherty, 1994; Pascarella & Terenzini, 2005, pp. 375-381) who see community colleges as places of otherwise unavailable opportunity, particularly for low income, minority, first generation, or poorly prepared students. Indeed, successful students are some of community colleges' most persuasive advocates. Moreover, many two-year students don't define success in terms of their graduation or transfer to a baccalaureate institution. Seen from the other perspective, however, it is clear that the chance of completing a BA or BS degree is lower for those who begin college in a two-year school than it is for those who commence higher education at four-year institutions (Lavin & Crook, 1990; Whitaker & Pascarella, 1994). Unfortunately, this finding is even stronger when community colleges rely upon part-time faculty who have been placed in the cold storage of temporary, insecure, and too often, dead-end positions.

With two part-time instructors employed for each faculty person working full-time, public community colleges now function to warehouse surplus instructors, becoming sites in which apparently untenable faculty aspirations for good faculty jobs are "cooled out."

During the year 2003, out of nearly 1.2 million U.S. faculty members, more than half a million were employed part-time. However, such aggregate data masks the telling comparison between public two and four-year schools. Of 451,000 faculty employed at public four-year schools, 316,000 were engaged on a full time basis. At public two-year colleges, by contrast, 110,000 were employed full-time with an additional 231,000 contracted on a part-time basis. The remaining faculty taught at private institutions where they are nearly evenly split among part- and full-time positions (NCES, 2004).

The point is that public community colleges clearly house a disproportionate number of the faculty hired outside the norms of security that were once considered hallmarks of academic life. No doubt, many part-time and temporary faculty prefer non-standard employment and view it as a way to accommodate other activities such as family or professional employment in another field. However, in a survey conducted at one suburban community college, 50 percent of the part-time faculty said they would prefer full-time positions, while another 20 percent sought more hours of employment than they were currently given. Job insecurity was also near the top of their concerns (Jacoby, 2005).

Given the current academic job market, it is difficult to see how most of these part time instructors can ever be accommodated with full-time secure positions. Instead, the community college cools them out through long years of disappointment, serving notice on part-time faculty that they must accept harsh conditions or move on. Many do precisely that. Others linger on in part-time jobs for five to 10 years hoping eventually to realize a full-time tenure track position only to find themselves increasingly demoralized in the knowledge that their current positions are likely to be as good as they will ever get. Many of those who do stay on within the community college system do so because they believe it is their calling. Sadly, their long service often becomes a stigma that reduces their opportunity to secure better academic positions.

It is legitimate to ask whether a faculty predominantly composed of underpaid and frequently mistreated individuals is likely to be able to rise up to the challenge of helping at-risk students to achieve the skills necessary to graduate, transfer, and otherwise fulfill their dreams. This challenge is especially hard because community college students often require high levels of support and care from their faculty. So it is perverse that their schools are disproportionately staffed by part-time instructors who themselves face immense pressure to husband scarce time in order to make their own financial ends meet.

The AAUP (2006) recently noted that pay for part-time faculty at the fiftieth percentile is just under $1700 per course, a sum that virtually dictates dependence upon other sources of income. Coupled with their ineligibility for most benefits, it can be no surprise that part-timers have been found to spend less time on office hours, on preparation, and on assignments in contrast with full-time faculty facing fewer monetary distractions.

As if this were not enough, additional impediments include a second-class status that makes part-time faculty unwelcome at departmental meetings or other functions where curriculum is discussed. It is common for part-time faculty not to have offices, or phones, and frequently, they are not even listed in their college directories, making it difficult for students to contact them.

Part-time faculty who want to construct rigorous and engaging classes may also be discouraged by last minute hires or by the fear that they may be discharged before their classes begin. Worse, given the short duration of part-time contracts, there is often little upon which to evaluate new part-time faculty other than student evaluations or complaints. Part-time instructors sense that their evaluations by students are likely to be lower if their grading is based upon rigorous standards.

So much of this would only sound like whining if the cooling out of faculty could not be demonstrated to interact negatively with community college students so as to further cool out their chances for success. In the accompanying chart for the year 2003, I assemble data from the National Center for Educational Statistics to show that those public two-year institutions having the highest part-time faculty ratios had substantially lower graduation rates.

Graduation Rates at Public Community Colleges Divided into Thirds According to their part-time faculty ratios in 2003

Best Third Middle Third Worst Third

Part-time Faculty Ratio 0.411 0.662 0.783

Graduation Ratio 0.302 0.255 0.215

Source: Original Analysis Using Data from NCES IPEDS Data http://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/

On average, the worst third of community colleges hire 78 percent of their faculty on a part-time basis. These colleges graduated just 21.5 percent of their full-time, first year degree-seeking students in three years or less. Schools in the middle and best third had lower part-time faculty percentages, 66 percent and 41 percent respectively. Their collective graduation rates were much higher at 25.5 percent, and 30.1 percent.

Certainly, there is room in this data for refinements by examining the many factors that are known to affect student performance. Yet, controlling for the student, institutional, and economic factors typically believed to affect graduation rate, an analysis of data for the year 2001 (Jacoby, 2006) shows that the basic result that higher part-time faculty ratios are significantly and negatively correlated to student graduation rates remained true even after adjusting for students who transfer to another school.

By lurching toward a cheap part-time faculty system that "cools out" the legitimate aspirations of our future teacher scholars, we simultaneously create new barriers for students looking to the community colleges for a helping hand. Do we really want to tell community college faculty and students that they should simply, "chill?"

References

AAUP, Devaluing the profession: Annual report on the economic status of the profession 2005-06. Retrieved Oct 22, 2006 from http://www.aaup.org/AAUP/About/committees/committee+repts/compensation/survey2005-06.htm

Clark, B. (1960). The ‘cooling-out' function in higher education American. Journal of Sociology, 65(6), 569-576.

Dougherty, K. (1994) The contradictory college: The conflicting origins, impacts, and futures of the community college. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press

Lavin, D. & Crook, D. (1990). Open admissions and its outcomes: Ethnic differences in long term educational attainment. American Journal of Education, 98, 389-425.

Jacoby, D. (2005). Part-time or contingent community college faculty and the desire for full-time tenure track position. Community College Journal of research and Practice, 12, 1-16.

Jacoby, D. (2006). Effects of part-time faculty employment on community college graduation rates. The Journal of Higher Education, 77(6), pp. 1081-1103.

National Center for Educational Statistics (2004), Digest of Educational Statistics, 2004. Retrieved November 1, 2006 from http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d04/tables/dt04_224.asp

Pascarella, E. & Terenzini, P. (2005). How college affects students: A third decade of research, Volume 2. San Francisco, CA: Jossey Bass.

Whitaker, D. & Pascarella, E. (1994). Two-year college attendance and socioeconomic attainment: Some additional evidence. Journal of Higher Education, 65, 194-210.

Cite This Article as: Teachers College Record, Date Published: November 09, 2006

http://www.tcrecord.org ID Number: 12834, Date Accessed: 12/5/2006 1:30:49 AM

Doug Lederman

11/21/11

CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- With much of the potential drama of the annual meeting having unfolded before it began -- with the cancellation of a planned session on the validity of the National Survey of Student Engagement -- there was no obvious center of gravity as the members of the Association for the Study of Higher Education gathered here. Instead, the conference offered its usual dizzying array of topics for exploration -- from student access and persistence to the changing role of the faculty to countless sessions on diversity. Below are a few highlights of the meeting, at least through the eyes of one observer:

Pros and Cons of For-Profits

For-profit colleges have become a growing force in higher education, with their enrollments surging (this year's totals notwithstanding) to a proportion of all postsecondary students that almost begins to equal the share of all negative higher ed-related headlines that they generate. But the scholarly scrutiny of the institutions has lagged, from a combination of lack of interest and understanding on the part of researchers educated in traditional institutions and the historical difficulty in studying private institutions that have few requirements to open their doors and their data.

That is beginning to change, with several universities (including the State University of New York at Albany and the University of Southern California) developing research specializations in for-profit higher education and the number of sessions and presentations on the topic edging up slowly at meetings like this one. A pair of papers by California researchers at the ASHE meeting provided a fascinating one-two punch in macro- and micro-level analyses of the role of for-profit colleges in the current higher education universe.

In her paper, Su Jin Jez, an assistant professor of public policy and administration at California State University at Sacramento, assessed the role that for-profit institutions are playing now -- and should be playing in the future -- in expanding access to and completion of higher education in her state, which has seen drastic cuts in budgets and enrollments in public higher education. Jez told that story with data, showing that for-profit colleges enroll more Californians than all sectors other than community colleges (at 380,000 students, far less than the California Community Colleges' 970,000 but more than third-place California State University at 332,000), greater proportions of black and Latino students than any other sector, and greater proportions of Pell Grant-eligible students than any sector but (surprisingly) private nonprofit colleges.

The institutions have increased the number of certificates and associate and bachelor's degrees they award, such that in 2008 they approached the number awarded by Cal State (which in turn was second to the community colleges) before dropping off sharply in 2009. The commercial higher education providers are a major provider of job-oriented certificates, Jez said, and are especially productive in many of the fields (health sciences, consumer services and apparel, visual arts and design, computer and information sciences) atop the California's list of employer needs.

"I was shocked to find that for-profits are producing one in five of California's undergraduate awards," Jez said. She acknowledged that her analysis did not focus on some of the thorny questions being raised about for-profit colleges -- about why students (and especially minority students) are enrolling there, about the quality of the degrees the institutions award, and the debt their students accumulate. (Another presenter, Donald E. Heller, director of the Center for the Study of Higher Education at Pennsylvania State University, raised many of those issues in a presentation based on a critical article he wrote about for-profit colleges for Change magazine this year.)

But Jez argued that the enrollment and completion numbers alone mean that the institutions "need to be a player in state-level strategic planning" in the state. California, she said, cannot reach its goals for postsecondary completion without for-profit colleges playing a role.

Another paper presented at the session examined the for-profit-college role through a much narrower prism: the needs of one student. The presentation by William G. Tierney, Wilbur-Kieffer Professor of Higher Education and director of the Center for Higher Education Policy Analysis at the University of Southern California, focused on Manny, his barber's son. (There were numerous jokes about the appropriateness of the hairstyling theme from a professor in Los Angeles.) Manny, Tierney said, graduated from high school with a so-so academic record, lives at home and works part-time, and wants to become a cosmetologist. Living in South Pasadena, the USC professor said, Manny has three viable options, all of which he explored this month. The local community college, Pasadena City College, would charge him about $5,000 for an 11-month curriculum, and with a $2,700 Pell Grant and two forms of state aid, Manny would emerge from that program with no debt. The college won't enroll its next group of students in the program until February – and Manny would not find out until then, Tierney said, whether it will have space for him, given budget constraints.

Manny's other two nearby options are proprietary schools run by the manufacturers Aveda and Paul Mitchell. Both of them would provide Manny the same credential he'd earn from the community college, but charge roughly $20,000 for it. (After a $5,500 Pell Grant, he would emerge from each with about $14,500 in loans, for a job that will pay $19,000 to start.) Graduates of the programs pass the state licensure exam in cosmetology at roughly comparable rates, about 90 percent at the community college and several points higher at the two for-profit colleges. He would be able to start classes at Aveda in early December, and at Paul Mitchell within a week.

Tierney, who co-wrote a 2007 book, New Players, Different Game (Johns Hopkins University Press) on for-profit higher education and calls himself a "loving critic" of the sector, asked the audience members where they would advise Manny to go; they were torn, with many suggesting the lower-cost community college but others recognizing the practical considerations that might point him to the for-profit alternatives.

"It seems irrational that if your salary is going to be $19,000, why would you choose an institution where you'll be $15,000 in debt and scot-free in the other?" But that assumes a level of choice that Manny may not have, Tierney said; he "may not get into the [Pasadena City College] program even in February," given the prospect of yet more budget cuts in the state.

"For those who wish to kill for-profits, where do we put the students who want degrees in cosmetology? If we had a vibrant public sector, I would probably agree [that the institutions might not be the ideal choice]," said Tierney. "But we do not.... I think it is necessary in America, if we want to increase capacity in the manner in which President Obama and others want, that we have to have [for-profits] exist."

In an interview after the panel, Tierney acknowledged that the arguments for a key for-profit role are strongest in many technical and job-related fields that other sectors of higher education shortchange, and that more aggressive state regulation in consumer protection is necessary to guard against abuses that have characterized some elements of the sector.

And the panel's moderator, Kevin Kinser, associate professor in the State University of New York at Albany's department of educational administration and policy studies, said that Jez's and Tierney's comparisons of the credentials earned and debt accumulated by the students who complete programs at nonprofit and for-profit institutions did not account for what happens to those who fail to finish the programs.

Given the significantly higher expense of the for-profit programs, he said, students like Manny who do not earn credentials from the program will find themselves in far worse shape than if they had entered but failed to complete a lower-cost program at a community college.

Impact of No-Loan Policies

Several dozen highly selective public and private colleges have eliminated loans for low- (and some middle-) income students in recent years, and the institutions have sometimes trumpeted the policies as boosting access to higher education for needy students. A study discussed at the ASHE meeting found that the policies have clearly increased the number of low-income students at the colleges and universities in question -- but concludes that there is little evidence that the policies have had a meaningful impact on the higher education access problem.

Nicholas Hillman, an assistant professor in the department of educational leadership and policy at the University of Utah, examines the 52 institutions that, from 2005 to 2008, dropped loans from the financial aid packages awarded to students under certain income levels and replaced them with outright grants. Hillman's study compares changes in the enrollment of Pell Grant-eligible students at those institutions with the trend at a group of 63 peer colleges.

The peer institutions started the period with significantly higher numbers of Pell-eligible students (2,454 on average, vs. 1,650), but the "no loan" institutions saw much sharper gains than did their peers, with the averages rising to 2,502 vs. 2,393, respectively. The public universities that adopted no-loan approaches saw particularly large increases in the number of Pell-eligible students, rising from about 4,500 to more than 5,200 on average, Hillman found. Those outcomes are undoubtedly "desirable" for the institutions and students in question, Hillman writes, but he questions the impact of the colleges' policies on the larger issue of higher education access. Even with the increases, the institutions enroll relatively few low-income students, and "the fiscal reality is that very few institutions have the financial resources to offer similar pledges to students," Hillman writes.

"Based on college choice literature, it is likely that students in elite higher education are already college-bound and no-loan policies are probably improving choice (rather than access) for these students. Accordingly, this analysis does not posit that no-loan policies expand 'access' per se."

The question for policy makers, he said, may be whether federal and state governments might be able to provide incentives to encourage colleges and universities without big endowments to adopt no-loan policies, or to target appropriations "to institutions that pledge to reduce prices for Pell recipients and other low-income students as a way to increase educational access and success in terms of socio-economic status."

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Higher Ed Research Roundup

Doug Lederman

11/21/11

After 40 Years of Growth and Change, Higher Education Faces New Challenges

40 Years of Higher Education | By the Numbers | Opinion: 40 Years Later

By FRANK H.T. RHODES

Winston Churchill, it is reported, would openly weep whenever he heard "Forty Years On," the song of his old school, Harrow. The 40th anniversary of the founding of The Chronicle of Higher Education is a cause not for weeping but for celebration. It is difficult now to imagine the world of higher education without it.

But what of higher education itself over the course of those 40 years, weeping or celebration? That's a more complex question.

Consider, first, the context in which The Chronicle began publication on November 23, 1966. On that day, The New York Times reported that Joe Frazier had knocked out Eddie Machen, that the Soviet Union's emphasis on civil defense reflected concern over China's growing nuclear capacity, that Dick Gregory would travel to North Vietnam, that President Lyndon B. Johnson aimed to reduce federal programs by $3-billion, that the Syrian government and the Iraqi Petroleum Company faced a "crisis," and that the D'Oyly Carte Company opened a run of Ruddigore at the City Center and "delivered it to the avid audience with a sparkling air of wicked innocence."

In that year, Medicare was introduced, the FDA declared "the Pill" safe, a first-class stamp cost 5 cents, and the Oscar for the best movie was awarded to The Sound of Music. Like the present, the country was engaged in a widely unpopular war, but, unlike the present, there was also a student draft. To those who lived through them, the 1960s will always be remembered not only as a time of educational change, but also as the great age of campus disruption. Protests convulsed the campuses.

It is easy to forget just how tumultuous those days were. Led by Berkeley, Columbia, and Harvard, campuses across the nation erupted in strikes, protests, and building takeovers. "Nonnegotiable demands" were presented on an almost daily basis. In 1969-70, at the height of student protests, there were, according to research by Helen Horowitz, a professor of history at Smith College, "9,408 outbreaks; 731 of them led to the intervention of police and arrests; 410 of which involved damage to property; and 230, physical violence." What a time to create a newspaper devoted to the coverage of higher education.

The scene in 2006 is vastly different. In retrospect, it seems remarkable that the nation's colleges and universities emerged relatively intact from those contentious days. But institutions have changed, and it is worth noting some of those changes.

Colleges and universities have continued to multiply to accommodate the nation's expanding population. In 1966 the total U.S. population was 196,560,338; this fall it hit 300 million. In about the same time, the number of colleges and universities rose from 2,329 to well over 4,000, including branch campuses. Each category of institution has seen a growth in newly created campuses.

The net addition of more than 900 four-year campuses and more than 900 two-year campuses represents a remarkable national commitment to higher education. That increase in overall numbers of campuses involved the closure of some existing institutions, as well as the creation of new ones. Some 583 colleges and universities closed their doors during this period, 48 of them public and 535 of them private. Natural selection, it seems, exists in higher education no less than in nature.

For-profit institutions have gained prominence. They now account for about 8 percent of student enrollment in colleges eligible for financial aid. That has been one of the biggest changes in the educational landscape. In 1966 such institutions were largely unknown. Today there are some 908, and the largest, the University of Phoenix, has an online enrollment of almost 116,000 students.

The proportions of students enrolled in public and private institutions have shifted. The percentage of students at private institutions has dropped from about 32 percent in 1966 to 25 percent — a trend that has persisted since the end of World War II.

The demographics of the student body have changed, and access has improved. Female enrollment has increased almost four times as rapidly as male, and the representation of women and underrepresented minority groups continues to increase, especially in fields in which they had earlier been seriously underrepresented.

For example, female degree recipients now outnumber men at every level except the doctorate, but even there women now earn 48 percent of the new Ph.D.'s, compared with 12 percent in 1966. Indeed, the growth in the proportion of women in both graduate and professional schools has been especially marked. In 1966 women earned just over 4 percent of all first professional degrees awarded; this year it is estimated they will receive almost 52 percent.

Minority groups have also made significant gains. African-American students have grown from 5 percent of the freshman class at four-year colleges 40 years ago to more than 11 percent today. We have no adequate data from 1966 for Latino students in the freshman class, but they now make up 7 percent. Asian-American students make up 8 percent, compared with 0.7 percent; American Indian students 1.7 percent, compared with 0.6 percent.

Colleges and universities are becoming increasingly international. More than 500,000 international students — about a quarter of all international students worldwide — were enrolled in American institutions in 2004, although other countries now outpace the United States in growth in that market. The number of American students studying abroad has exploded from fewer than 25,000 in 1965-66 to nearly 206,000 in 2004-5. American institutions offer degree programs in at least 42 other countries.

An increasingly well-educated population has arisen from those changes in enrollment patterns. Between 1960 and 2000, the percentage of the population age 25 and older with a bachelor's degree or higher more than tripled to almost one-fourth. By 2005 more than 18 percent of American adults held bachelor's degrees, and about 10 percent held graduate or professional degrees.

Developments in information technology have transformed colleges and universities. The rise of computers has had a huge and largely beneficial impact on instruction and learning, research, student life, and countless other aspects of higher education. The world and all its knowledge are now literally at the fingertips of today's undergraduates. The relationship between such computerization and the quality of learning is not easily quantified, and the impact on college costs continues to be a matter of debate. Distance learning, however, is here to stay and will only continue to influence our institutions in the future.

Student backgrounds and attitudes have shifted. The survey of freshman students at four-year institutions conducted each fall since 1966 by the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California at Los Angeles depicts in strong relief the gains that women have made in higher education. The percentage of freshmen whose mothers had college degrees grew from just over 20 percent to more than 52 percent, and the percentage with mothers with graduate degrees increased more than fivefold to 18 percent. Such trends have been accompanied by a striking decline, from 35 percent to less than 10 percent, over the last 30 years in the percentage of students who listed their mother's occupation as homemaker.

Similarly, the aspiration of freshman women to pursue graduate and professional work shows a fourfold increase between 1966 and 2005 in the percentage of women aspiring to law degrees, an almost fivefold increase in interest in medical and dental degrees, and an almost threefold increase in doctoral degrees.

Student attitudes show striking changes over the past 30 years, with declining support for laws prohibiting homosexual relationships and for those who believe the activities of married women are best confined to home and family. Today's students appear to have more intellectual and social self-confidence and a greater belief in their abilities in many areas, including leadership and motivation. Fewer expect to be satisfied with college, but more expect to graduate with honors and more expect to work to support themselves in college.

The numbers of students applying for admission to three or more colleges has more than doubled since the mid-60s. Meanwhile, the reasons for deciding to go to college have changed in emphasis, with many more students attending because they are following their parents' wishes or hope to make more money.

The percentage of students expressing enthusiasm for cleaning up the environment has waned by half since the early 1970s, to 20 percent, while the percentage of those saying they desire to develop a meaningful philosophy of life has plummeted from 86 percent to 45 percent, and of those wishing to keep up with political affairs has fallen from 60 percent to 36 percent. Meanwhile "being very well off financially" has become far more important (75 percent of students compared with 42 percent in 1966). In terms of political views, somewhat fewer of today's students than their predecessors in the early 1970s characterize themselves as liberal (27 percent compared with 36 percent) and rather more as conservative (23 percent compared with 17 percent).

Few data are available that allow us to compare the broader cultural landscape in higher education over a span of 40 years. There are, no doubt, marked differences between various types of colleges and universities, and even perhaps within them. But a number of continuing trends seem to raise general concerns.

The public universities — especially the flagships — have suffered from a prolonged period of shrinking state support as a portion of their revenues. The University of Michigan, for example, now receives only about 8 percent of its total annual revenue from the state, and the University of California at Los Angeles only 15 percent. Although the situation has somewhat improved recently, the long-term tightening of state budgets has led increasingly to what several writers have called the privatization of public universities. But that "privatization" is one-sided: The universities have been required to raise more of their support from private sources, including tuition, but are still not allowed much freedom to manage their own affairs. The fate of the flagships should be a matter of public concern because their contributions to higher education — graduate and professional, as well as undergraduate — are major. It is time for the states to give them the freedom they need to develop their programs and to then hold them accountable for reaching specific goals.

Collegiality within academe seems to be a vanishing trait. Instead "the university community" has become a euphemism for an assemblage of conflicting interests. Perhaps "community," like youth, is never what it was, but the practical effects of the loss of meaningful dialogue and collegiality are serious. In education, the increasing departmentalization and fragmentation of the curriculum represent a growing threat to the quality of the undergraduate experience. Meanwhile, the great overarching challenges of our time — climate change, energy supplies, sustainability, poverty, hunger, conflict and war, health and disease — sprawl across the boundaries of the disciplines. With faculty appointments and awards jealously preserved within the confines of traditional departments, the academy is ill equipped to bring the full weight of its expertise to bear on such vital issues.

Faculty members' allegiances to their institutions have eroded. Such loyalty has been replaced by a greater commitment to the invisible scholarly guild: the professional associations, scholarly societies, and online scholarly conclaves. Some will argue that this change is an inevitable reflection of the scholarly fragmentation I have just described and of the relative reduction in the proportion of tenured or tenure-track faculty members, which has slipped from 57 percent to 35 percent of the academic work force over the last 30 years. Perhaps. Others will claim that it is less of a problem in liberal-arts colleges than in research universities. I hope that is so. But if I am right, both our institutions and our students are the poorer for the change.

Structural reform remains elusive in the academic culture. The structural imbalance between goals, tasks, and resources seems to have shown little improvement since 1966. The rigidity of departmental structures of faculty appointments continues to limit the ability of colleges to adapt and respond to new circumstances. Any change tends to be laboriously incremental, with a significant time lag between the decision to make it and the ability of the institution to carry it out.

***

Respice, prospice. Surveying the landscape over the past 40 years, we can find much to celebrate, much to praise. But looking forward, our celebration must be calibrated against both the situation within our own society and the achievements of the rest of the world. Against that background, recent commentators have found little about which to cheer.

Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, commenting on the report of the Commission on the Future of Higher Education, for example, has declared:

"Our universities are known as the best in the world. And a lot of people will tell you things are going just fine. But when 90 percent of the fastest-growing jobs require postsecondary education, are we satisfied with 'just' fine? Is it 'fine' that college tuition has outpaced inflation, family income, even doubling the cost of health care? Is it 'fine' that only half of our students graduate on time? Is it 'fine' that students often graduate so saddled with debt they can't buy a home or start a family? None of this seems 'fine' to me. Not as a policy maker, not as a taxpayer, and certainly not as the mother of a college sophomore.

"The commission drew a similar conclusion. In their words, 'Higher education has become at times self-satisfied and unduly expensive.' In fact, times have changed. Nearly two-thirds of all high-growth, high-wage jobs created in the next decade will require a college degree, a degree only one-third of Americans have. Where we once were leaders, now other nations educate more of their young adults to more-advanced levels than we do."

The four major issues raised by the Spellings commission — accessibility, affordability, accountability, and quality — have all increased in significance since 1966. They will never be "solved" but must continually be confronted if colleges and universities are to play their fullest role, continue to enjoy the public trust, and retain their independence. Although there will be federal and state efforts in each of these four areas, real change, if it is to come, must come from within institutions.

Distinctively American Aid

Do past events encourage hope for such change? Consider, for example, the

closely linked concerns of affordability and access. Looked at over a 40-year time span, America's higher-education institutions are now as accessible as any in the world to all students, providing they can afford the tuition charges and demonstrate their competency to perform the work required. Virtually all our colleges charge for their services and require certain minimal standards of academic preparation, in contrast to countries with free tuition and open admission. Over the past four decades, that has produced a pragmatic and distinctively American pattern of financial aid, with a mixture of grant aid and student self-help in the form of loans and work.

Tuition and fees have been steadily rising, which is scarcely cause for surprise. What is a matter of public concern is that they have risen so sharply. Over the last quarter-century, average tuition and fees have increased more rapidly than rates of inflation, per-capita personal income, consumer prices, prescription health care, and health insurance. And that has a direct bearing on access. The unmet financial need of students from the lowest family income group (less than $34,000) has grown by 80 percent since the early 90s.

Colleges are quick to respond that higher education is labor intensive, that at public institutions those sharp increases reflect substantial losses in the proportion of state support, that at private institutions the fastest-growing expense has been financial aid. All that is true. But there is also nagging public concern, forcefully expressed in the Spellings commission report, about what seems to be declining teaching loads, a growing emphasis on buying bright students with merit awards, and an increase in the proportion of students taking more than four years to graduate.

We in higher education would be unwise to ignore such concerns. We shall see a steady increase in the number of high-school graduates over most of the next decade, but the changing geographic distribution; age range; racial, ethnic, and economic characteristics of those students; as well as their level of preparation, will place substantial new demands on higher education. We should respect warnings and complaints from colleges about ill-advised demands for increases in efficiency and productivity, but the problem of costs is real and will not go away.

Closely related to the issue of access is the academic preparation that students need to enter college and succeed there. If that is to improve, the states, the federal government, businesses, and colleges must all play a role. We can argue forever about who is responsible for failing schools, and there is enough blame to cover all of the players. But the urgent task facing the nation is to improve school performance. Better teacher education, partnerships with elementary and secondary schools, cooperation in curriculum planning, distance learning, remedial programs, and advanced placement will all enhance academic preparation. And improving that will, in turn, improve all levels of work in the schools.

Accountability is the other big "A." The Spellings commission urged institutions to make graduation rates, time to degree, and other performance measures available to the public. There will be legitimate debate as to the wisdom and effectiveness of using various assessment instruments, but the call for greater academic "transparency" is not one that colleges should neglect.

What about quality, the fourth issue the commission raised? Although no simple test can compare the achievements of the graduates of our 4,216 colleges, there are troubling signs. In surveys employers have raised questions about the critical abilities of recent graduates, and whatever surveys of student ability that do exist are also cause for concern. America has some of the world's best colleges: The sweep of the "scholarly" Nobel prizes this fall by our nation's faculty members confirms that. But we need to take seriously the call for quality and accountability. If we in higher education do not find some way to demonstrate the effectiveness of our programs and represent the abilities and skills of our graduates, others — for instance, the federal and state governments — may determine to do it for us.

Finally, we are constantly reminded that we live in a global economy, in which science, technology, invention, and innovation are the keys to survival and success. Thirty-five to 45 years ago, we led the world in the proportion of our adult population holding both high-school diplomas and college degrees. No more. We now rank seventh internationally in the percentage of 25- to 34-year-olds holding college degrees.

Of special concern is the lack of a significant increase in science, mathematics, engineering, and technology graduates. According to The Economist, India graduates 400,000 engineers and 200,000 IT professionals each year, and the cost to employ an Indian graduate is about 12 percent that of an American one. Talent, as it has been remarked, is now the world's most sought-after commodity. Ranking in international educational comparisons may well indicate future rankings in national economic success.

Even as we celebrate the achievements of higher education since The Chronicle's founding in 1966, we should also confront the issues the Spellings report has raised. Our national interest and our people's well-being, our growing population and its rapidly changing demography, our depleted planet and its changing climate, all create an added sense of urgency.

"The task of a university," Alfred North Whitehead once declared, "is the creation of the future, so far as rational thought, and civilized modes of appreciation, can affect the issue." Forty years on, we should welcome, embrace, and reaffirm that high calling.

Frank H.T. Rhodes is president emeritus of Cornell University.

http://chronicle.com

Section: Special Report

Volume 53, Issue 14, Page A18

By RICHARD RODRIGUEZ

There is something unsettling about immigrants because ... well, because they chatter incomprehensibly, and they get in everyone's way. Immigrants seem to be bent on undoing America. Just when Americans think we know who we are -- we are Protestants, culled from Western Europe, are we not? -- then new immigrants appear from Southern Europe or from Eastern Europe. We -- we who are already here -- we don't know exactly what the latest comers will mean to our community. How will they fit in with us? Thus we -- we who were here first -- we begin to question our own identity.

After a generation or two, the grandchildren or the great-grandchildren of immigrants to the United States and the grandchildren of those who tried to keep immigrants out of the United States will romanticize the immigrant, will begin to see the immigrant as the figure who teaches us most about what it means to be an American. The immigrant, in mythic terms, travels from the outermost rind of America to the very center of American mythology. None of this, of course, can we admit to the Vietnamese immigrant who served us our breakfast at the hotel this morning. In another 40 years, we will be prepared to say to the Vietnamese immigrant that he, with his breakfast tray, with his intuition for travel, with his memory of tragedy, with his recognition of peerless freedoms, he fulfills the meaning of America.

In 1997, Gallup conducted a survey on race relations in America, but the poll was concerned only with white and black Americans. No question was put to the aforementioned Vietnamese man. There was certainly no question for the Chinese grocer, none for the Guatemalan barber, none for the tribe of Mexican Indians who reroofed your neighbor's house.

The American conversation about race has always been a black-and-white conversation, but the conversation has become as bloodless as badminton.

I have listened to the black-and-white conversation for most of my life. I was supposed to attach myself to one side or the other, without asking the obvious questions: What is this perpetual dialectic between Europe and Africa? Why does it admit so little reference to anyone else?

I am speaking to you in American English that was taught me by Irish nuns -- immigrant women. I wear an Indian face; I answer to a Spanish surname as well as this California first name, Richard. You might wonder about the complexity of historical factors, the collision of centuries, that creates Richard Rodriguez. My brownness is the illustration of that collision, or the bland memorial of it. I stand before you as an Impure-American, an Ambiguous-American.

In the 19th century, Texans used to say that the reason Mexicans were so easily defeated in battle was because we were so dilute, being neither pure Indian nor pure Spaniard. Yet, at the same time, Mexicans used to say that Mexico, the country of my ancestry, joined two worlds, two competing armies. José Vasconcelos, the Mexican educator and philosopher, famously described Mexicans as la raza cósmica, the cosmic race. In Mexico what one finds as early as the 18th century is a predominant population of mixed-race people. Also, once the slave had been freed in Mexico, the incidence of marriage between Indian and African people there was greater than in any other country in the Americas and has not been equaled since.

Race mixture has not been a point of pride in America. Americans speak more easily about "diversity" than we do about the fact that I might marry your daughter; you might become we; we might become us. America has so readily adopted the Canadian notion of multiculturalism because it preserves our preference for thinking ourselves separate -- our elbows need not touch, thank you. I would prefer that table. I can remain Mexican, whatever that means, in the United States of America.

I would propose that instead of adopting the Canadian model of multiculturalism, America might begin to imagine the Mexican alternative -- that of a mestizaje society.

Because of colonial Mexico, I am mestizo. But I was reinvented by President Richard Nixon. In the early 1970s, Nixon instructed the Office of Management and Budget to identify the major racial and ethnic groups in the United States. OMB came up with five major ethnic or racial groups. The groups are white, black, Asian/Pacific Islander, American Indian/Eskimo, and Hispanic.

It's what I learned to do when I was in college: to call myself a Hispanic. At my university we even had separate cafeteria tables and "theme houses," where the children of Nixon could gather -- of a feather. Native Americans united. African-Americans. Casa Hispanic.

The interesting thing about Hispanics is that you will never meet us in Latin America. You may meet Chileans and Peruvians and Mexicans. You will not meet Hispanics. If you inquire in Lima or Bogotá about Hispanics, you will be referred to Dallas. For "Hispanic" is a gringo contrivance, a definition of the world according to European patterns of colonization. Such a definition suggests I have more in common with Argentine-Italians than with American Indians; that there is an ineffable union between the white Cuban and the mulatto Puerto Rican because of Spain. Nixon's conclusion has become the basis for the way we now organize and understand American society.

The Census Bureau foretold that by the year 2003, Hispanics would outnumber blacks to become the largest minority in the United States. And, indeed, the year 2003 has arrived and the proclamation of Hispanic ascendancy has been published far and wide. While I admit a competition has existed -- does exist -- in America between Hispanic and black people, I insist that the comparison of Hispanics with blacks will lead, ultimately, to complete nonsense. For there is no such thing as a Hispanic race. In Latin America, one sees every race of the world. One sees white Hispanics, one sees black Hispanics, one sees brown Hispanics who are Indians, many of whom do not speak Spanish because they resist Spain. One sees Asian-Hispanics. To compare blacks and Hispanics, therefore, is to construct a fallacious equation.

Some Hispanics have accepted the fiction. Some Hispanics have too easily accustomed themselves to impersonating a third race, a great new third race in America. But Hispanic is an ethnic term. It is a term denoting culture. So when the Census Bureau says by the year 2060 one-third of all Americans will identify themselves as Hispanic, the Census Bureau is not speculating in pigment or quantifying according to actual historical narratives, but rather is predicting how by the year 2060 one-third of all Americans will identify themselves culturally. For a country that traditionally has taken its understandings of community from blood and color, the new circumstance of so large a group of Americans identifying themselves by virtue of language or fashion or cuisine or literature is an extraordinary change, and a revolutionary one.

People ask me all the time if I envision another Quebec forming in the United States because of the large immigrant movement from the south. Do I see a Quebec forming in the Southwest, for example? No, I don't see that at all. But I do notice the Latin American immigrant population is as much as 10 years younger than the U.S. national population. I notice the Latin American immigrant population is more fertile than the U.S. national population. I see the movement of the immigrants from south to north as a movement of youth -- like approaching spring! -- into a country that is growing middle-aged. I notice immigrants are the archetypal Americans at a time when we -- U.S. citizens -- have become post-Americans, most concerned with subsidized medications.

I was at a small Apostolic Assembly in East Palo Alto a few years ago -- a mainly Spanish-speaking congregation in an area along the freeway, near the heart of the Silicon Valley. This area used to be black East Palo Alto, but it is quickly becoming an Asian and Hispanic Palo Alto neighborhood. There was a moment in the service when newcomers to the congregation were introduced. Newcomers brought letters of introduction from sister evangelical churches in Latin America. The minister read out the various letters and pronounced the names and places of origin to the community. The congregation applauded. And I thought to myself: It's over. The border is over. These people were not being asked whether they had green cards. They were not being asked whether they arrived here legally or illegally. They were being welcomed within a new community for reasons of culture. There is now a north-south line that is theological, a line that cannot be circumvented by the U.S. Border Patrol.

I was on a British Broadcasting Corporation interview show, and a woman introduced me as being "in favor" of assimilation. I am not in favor of assimilation any more than I am in favor of the Pacific Ocean or clement weather. If I had a bumper sticker on the subject, it might read something like ASSIMILATION HAPPENS. One doesn't get up in the morning, as an immigrant child in America, and think to oneself, "How much of an American shall I become today?" One doesn't walk down the street and decide to be 40 percent Mexican and 60 percent American. Culture is fluid. Culture is smoke. You breathe it. You eat it. You can't help hearing it -- Elvis Presley goes in your ear, and you cannot get Elvis Presley out of your mind.

I am in favor of assimilation. I am not in favor of assimilation. I recognize assimilation. A few years ago, I was in Merced, Calif. -- a town of about 75,000 people in the Central Valley where the two largest immigrant groups at that time (California is so fluid, I believe this is no longer the case) were Laotian Hmong and Mexicans. Laotians have never in the history of the world, as far as I know, lived next to Mexicans. But there they were in Merced, and living next to Mexicans. They don't like each other. I was talking to the Laotian kids about why they don't like the Mexican kids. They were telling me that the Mexicans do this and the Mexicans don't do that, when I suddenly realized that they were speaking English with a Spanish accent.

On his interview show, Bill Moyers once asked me how I thought of myself. As an American? Or Hispanic? I answered that I am Chinese, and that is because I live in a Chinese city and because I want to be Chinese. Well, why not? Some Chinese-American people in the Richmond and Sunset districts of San Francisco sometimes paint their houses (so many qualifiers!) in colors I would once have described as garish: lime greens, rose reds, pumpkin. But I have lived in a Chinese city for so long that my eye has taken on that palette, has come to prefer lime greens and rose reds and all the inventions of this Chinese Mediterranean. I see photographs in magazines or documentary footage of China, especially rural China, and I see what I recognize as home. Isn't that odd?

I do think distinctions exist. I'm not talking about an America tomorrow in which we're going to find that black and white are no longer the distinguishing marks of separateness. But many young people I meet tell me they feel like Victorians when they identify themselves as black or white. They don't think of themselves in those terms. And they're already moving into a world in which tattoo or ornament or movement or commune or sexuality or drug or rave or electronic bombast are the organizing principles of their identity. The notion that they are white or black simply doesn't occur.

And increasingly, of course, one meets children who really don't know how to say what they are. They simply are too many things. I met a young girl in San Diego at a convention of mixed-race children, among whom the common habit is to define one parent over the other -- black over white, for example. But this girl said that her mother was Mexican and her father was African. The girl said "Blaxican." By reinventing language, she is reinventing America.

America does not have a vocabulary like the vocabulary the Spanish empire evolved to describe the multiplicity of racial possibilities in the New World. The conversation, the interior monologue of America cannot rely on the old vocabulary -- black, white. We are no longer a black-white nation.

So, what myth do we tell ourselves? The person who got closest to it was Karl Marx. Marx predicted that the discovery of gold in California would be a more central event to the Americas than the discovery of the Americas by Columbus -- which was only the meeting of two tribes, essentially, the European and the Indian. But when gold was discovered in California in the 1840s, the entire world met. For the first time in human history, all of the known world gathered. The Malaysian stood in the gold fields alongside the African, alongside the Chinese, alongside the Australian, alongside the Yankee.

That was an event without parallel in world history and the beginning of modern California -- why California today provides the mythological structure for understanding how we might talk about the American experience: not as biracial, but as the re-creation of the known world in the New World.

Sometimes truly revolutionary things happen without regard. I mean, we may wake up one morning and there is no black race. There is no white race either. There are mythologies, and -- as I am in the business, insofar as I am in any business at all, of demythologizing such identities as black and white -- I come to you as a man of many cultures. I come to you as Chinese. Unless you understand that I am Chinese, then you have not understood anything I have said.

FROM: Section: Chronicle Review Volume 50, Issue 3, Page B10 September 12 2003

by Portia Culver Sabin — 2007

Background/Context: This study attempts to join the debate around the definition of "education" by looking at it as an ongoing, everyday social practice. It follows decades of work done on "love" in America and opens an inquiry into "friendship" as a product of situated practical action. It also challenges social science to shift its focus from the shaped individual to the social processes of shaping and transforming.

Purpose: To study the development and maintenance of relationships between college students in America.

Setting: A freshman-only college dormitory in the Pacific Northwest of the United States.

Population: Twenty-four18- and 19-year-old first- and second-year college students.

Research Design: This is an ethnographic study of students. The author lived in a college dormitory and conducted participant observation and informal interviews with the students.

Conclusions/Recommendations: "Education" may be understood as an ongoing social practice. Social interaction cannot be approached from the standpoint that behavior is based on previously accumulated knowledge. Rather, interaction must be understood as the complex locus of people doing things together: being held accountable, coercing, and resisting each other. As meaning is made through social interaction, the process of social interaction might be termed an ongoing, deliberate, critical process of finding out what is going on. And people find out by instructing and being instructed by those around them. It is for this reason that we suggest that the focus of our research needs to be shifted from the shaped or transformed individual to the social processes of shaping and transforming.

"The exchange of enthusiasms among adolescents is educative."Lawrence Cremin (1976, 50)

"If it was meant to be you shouldn't fight like that."Pia (first-year student at Big Fir)

The statement in the second epigraph above was collected during my fieldwork

among college students in the United States. It will not be surprising to people familiar with America to read that Pia was commenting on the romantic relationship of another student on her dormitory floor. Indeed, that college students in dormitories should talk about each other's romantic entanglements may seem too trivial to be the focus of research. But what does this statement tell us about (1) the relationship between the participants in the conversation (Pia, "you," the note-taking anthropologist, and so on) and (2) the relationship between "you" and a contested boyfriend? What does it tell us about the properties of these relationships and their impact on the unfolding of everyday interaction? How is one to account for the fact that, even as they may take the meaning of such statements for granted, these students make them again and again as if they were instructing each other? And, practically, what means did these students use to transform each other? In answering these questions, I show how the statements that students make to one another are instrumental in the construction of the particular social reality in which the students are immersed (who they are "friends" with at this moment in their lives). And I look at such statements, at the time when they are made, as "instructions" within longer, "educational" sequences between specific sets of "friends."

The general question of this article concerns how people in America find out about "friendship" and "love." Note that I say "find out," not "learn." When the question is phrased as a matter of individual learning (enculturation, socialization), how to answer it is already constituted by the question: children in America, one at a time, watch movies and television, listen to songs, possibly overhear conversations by parents, siblings and other kin, so that, sometime between ages 13 and 19, they are, personally, transformed into people who "know about love." However, investigating such a personal transformation, even if it does happen, tells us little about the process of finding out that "love" is something that a specific person must be concerned with at a specific time. Nor does focusing on "the learning of a single individual" bring out what we notice in observation over time, which is that such learning, even if it can be positively shown to occur, is never final.

"Finding out," on the other hand, is a more useful term for describing what we observe about people in interaction because it implies an ongoing and ubiquitous social process. Continually (if we look for it), people act, and then other people "instruct" them about whether their actions are (or were) "right" or "wrong" on any number of axes. This activity constitutes the actual social context in which all parties must interact on a daily basis, while at the same time constructing (establishing, reinforcing, destroying) relationships between the parties. In the United States, two of these relationships, "friendship" and "love," are singled out as special because they index the powerful ideological discourses of equality, mutuality, and individual freedom. What this means, in everyday life, is that people in the United States are held accountable to both friendship and love. This accountability produces the paradox that drives this research: How are these relationships enforced on people?

In this article, I discuss findings from a nine-month study of college students in a freshman dormitory in the United States. Most of the data are drawn from participant observation of the twenty-four 18- and 19-year-olds with whom I lived on the fifth floor of Tower Dorm at a school I call Big Fir. I wanted to observe people creating social relationships from scratch, and a college dorm provides an excellent opportunity to do just that. All the students on my floor had been randomly assigned to live together, and none knew one another before the first day of school. As a result, on that day, the students and I were all "friendless," and all whom I got to know set about creating relationships with one another. Nine months later, we all had made friends with people on the floor, we were known to have made friends, we were discussed in terms of the friends we had or had not made. And some of the students had developed and ended publicly acknowledged "special" relationships of friendship and love, and all shadings in between. The set of these publicly acknowledged relationships is what I define here as "relationships of sentiment." The movement in and out of these relationships, to the extent that it was publicly discussed (evaluated, rationalized, reflected on) is what I refer to as "sentimental education."

The argument proceeds in two steps. First, I briefly discuss my own experience with the initial stages of making relationships. Then I examine how people in my study interacted with one another around matters of "romance" and thereby constituted a particular form of relationship they referred to as "friendship." To do this, I analyze conversations between three girls: Jenny, Pia, and Norah. Excerpts from their conversations demonstrate coercion, correctives, and sanctions occurring with regularity. My own experiences would suggest that many of the things these girls said to one another were "unfriendly," yet these girls never pointed at these behaviors as evidence that they were not "friends." I suggest, in fact, that in this context and in this group, conversational instructing, coercing, or sanctioning practically constituted the friendship. And through this practical activity, these so-constituted friends deliberately attempted to change one another around their relationships of sentiment (both friendship and romance). I argue that it is possible that this ongoing sentimental education is what generations of researchers on the ideological power of "love in America" have been talking about (Lynd and Lynd 1929/1956; Schneider 1968/1980; Varenne 1977; Moffatt 1989; Holland and Eisenhart 1990; Swidler 2001).

The article has three main parts. First, I sketch how I myself was first caught in the friendship web and discovered how even my 30 years of life experiences (including all I "knew" about "making friends" in high school, college, graduate school, and beyond) were not fully enough to make an effortless entry into the lives of the students I met in this dorm. This serves as a brief example of my analytic process in this research. Second, I provide an overview of my theoretical framework and contrast my work with other research on friendship. Third, I present an extended case study involving three girls discussing and participating in the process that led to a major change in the love relationships of one of them. In conclusion, I reemphasize that, as I watched the pair Jenny/Karl dissolve and the pair Jenny/Eric arise, I continually ran into the small group that included Jenny, Pia, and Norah (who called each other "friends").

"MAKING FRIENDS" ON CAMPUS

New first-year college students have something in common: they must all deal with what they find waiting for them when they arrive on campus, what is now often referred to in organizational literature as the "culture" of that school. Finding out "how things are done" in that context is what allows students to lay claim to being a part of that group—to speak of themselves and others as "Yalies," "Grinnellians," or "Firries" (in the case of Big Fir). The data I gathered at Big Fir consisted of ordinary practical actions in the context of college, like "partying," studying, dating, and making friends. The historical discourse of college life suggests that these behaviors would be observable at any college in the country. They are certainly a matter of much concern because they can be considered either fully appropriate or, on the contrary, dangerous to the well-being of those involved. However, making friends, though ubiquitous, is rarely studied as a practical activity. Interestingly, the term itself implies a degree of deliberateness that fits well within an American individualistic discourse in which a person actively sets out to make friends. As I discovered, however, it seems that "making friends" is more of a cultural imperative; it is something that everyone is liable to be caught by, even against one's will. My own experiences with the formation of relationships of sentiment during this study may serve as an example of both deliberate attempts to make friends and of being caught by friendship. It will also serve as an example of how something as seemingly simple as making friends—which I, as a 30-year-old American, might have been assumed to have done many times over—is not necessarily something I can be said to "know" how to do.

I went to Kat's room to ask her something and found her on the phone and her friend Laura sitting on her couch bed. It appeared from Kat's tone that something was wrong. I talked to Laura for a minute, and when Kat got off the phone I asked her what was the matter. She told me to sit down. Then she said, "Are you just going to use this for your study?" I asked her what she meant. She said, "You like me, right? You're my friend, right?"

This interaction with Kat occurred 12 days into the school year and highlights both a central difficulty of doing research and a key element of relationships of sentiment in America. By definition, a researcher establishes a relationship with his or her informants simply by undertaking a study. Even the most supposedly impersonal methods, like surveys and questionnaires, create a relationship of researcher and subject even if the two parties never meet. And this relationship, like all relationships, has its own historical discourse available to all parties for use in making meaning out of the interaction.

One of my contentions in this work is that colleges are contexts in which students can be "caught"1 by certain relationships of sentiment, most commonly friendship. As shown in the excerpt from my field notes above, I too was eligible to be caught by friendship in the course of my everyday interactions with students. In other words, for me, as for the students I observed, friendship was revealed to be relevant in the context of our dorm floor on an ongoing basis. The excerpt above is an example of how its relevance was revealed socially, and a reminder (for me) that I could not ignore it even if I wished to. And I did wish to. Indeed, I had hoped upon entering the field to pass as a researcher; I thought that students might find me interesting, cool, or nice, but that I would largely be able to observe without being made accountable to relationships of sentiment with my informants.

To trace how I found myself in the above situation on only the 12th day of school, I consulted my field notes. Two days before school started, I went to the college to begin moving my belongings into my room. Kat came over and introduced herself. Not only was she the floor resident advisor (RA), but she was also my next-door neighbor with whom I shared a bathroom. She asked if I could have a meeting with her and the assistant director (AD) of housing. I said yes, and Kat called the AD, who was available. The AD came upstairs, and the three of us had a meeting immediately in the floor lounge during which we discussed what I was doing there and how my research might affect interpersonal relations on the floor. After the meeting, Kat told me that she was worried about me before she met me, but now that she had, she was "confident that everything will be okay." She said, "I thought you wouldn't be cool, but you are." I said, "Thank you" and did not pursue the topic. Kat asked me some questions about how I decided on Big Fir, which I answered. She then began telling me about her life: where she was from, what she thought of Big Fir, what she thought of people from this state as opposed to her home state, and what she thought my project would be like. I returned to campus early in the morning on the day that students moved in and saw Kat periodically when she came back to her room. When I saw her, I offered her a cupcake, and she told me what she thought about the people she was helping to move into the dorm. Later that day, she invited me to have dinner with her and the other RAs. On the second day of school, I was writing field notes in my room when Kat came over. She stood by my desk and said she was "really upset" about Van, because "he keeps speaking to me in this tone of voice like he thinks I'm his mom." She asked for my advice. I told her to tell that same story to him and offered her a cookie. She went and spoke to Van and then came back and told me that he had apologized and that she was happy she had talked to him.

It appears from this short case study that observable behavior can be made relevant to a process of meaning-making at any time. Kat's quote above effectually demanded that meaning be made of my behaviors of the preceding days. I had shared food with her, talked about problems and feelings, and given advice (which she had taken). The transformation of these behaviors into markers of sentiment (i.e., that I "liked" her) is, in this case, a seemingly "normal" process; certainly neither Laura nor I treated her statements as inappropriate. Indeed, I was compelled by that situation to personally face how relationships of sentiment (friendship and romance) are revealed by students working together in the course of their everyday lives and how those relationships are made—immediately and even urgently—relevant to a given context.

Getting caught in relationships of sentiment with students was not the only pitfall I faced during this study. The opposite—not getting caught—had the potential to be just as problematic. I realized during the course of my research that most of the work and talk I was interested in took place in small groups, between people who referred to one another as friends. Being excluded from some of the small groups on my floor in which this work might have been taking place was a consequence of not establishing a relationship with every student. And indeed, I did not establish relationships with all the students on my floor. Certain students did not do what Kat (and others) had done, such as sharing food with me, asking me for advice, or engaging in "problem" and "feeling" talk. Pia and Norah were two of these, at least for most of the first half of the year. When I approached them, they smiled and answered all my questions but did nothing else. Our interactions felt awkward to me, as illustrated by next.

One night early in the year when I saw that Pia and Norah's door was open, I put my head in and said hi. Norah was reading on her bed, and Pia was not there. I asked Norah how she was doing. She said, "Fine." I said I was just wandering around and thought I'd say hi. She said, "I understand." There was a moment of silence, then I said goodbye and left. Norah and Pia never behaved in a way that I recognized as "unfriendly," but it did not seem to me like we were friends. And despite my efforts, I could not establish a relationship with them by myself.

The night that a relationship was established between me and Pia and Norah is instructive as an illustration of the unique, unrepeatable, unforeseeable nature of situated practical action. The evening of Thursday, November 15, was a particularly eventful night on my floor. I arrived at about 11 p.m. and walked around the floor:

I went to Karl and Trace's room. I talked with them for a long time and watched a movie with Trace. I left Trace and Karl's room and walked into the hall just as a bunch of people crowded into it. Jenny was there in her nightgown. "What's going on?" I asked. "Andrew just put a hole in the wall of the lounge," Jenny said. "What?" everyone said, and we all walked to the lounge. People were running around and everyone was talking at once. I asked where the hole was. Someone pulled aside a couch cushion and showed me a hole about two inches wide. I asked what happened and someone said he threw a chair. "He's drunk," several people said. I asked, "Where is he now?" and they said in Pia and Norah's room. I went down the hall and Kevin was standing guard with his big stick. I went past him into the room. Pia and Norah were on their respective beds and Andrew was lying on the floor in the fetal position, covered with a coat. A girl I'd never seen before was kneeling by him, stroking his head. I said, "What's going on in here?" The girl said Andrew wasn't feeling well. I asked who she was and she said she was a friend from his floor. I said, "Maybe he should go home." The girl said, "Come on sweetie, let's go." Andrew mumbled something about shoes in a high-pitched, childlike voice. The girl helped him get his shoes on while I went over to Norah and asked how she was doing. She said fine. In a minute the girl helped Andrew up and they went out, past Kevin, and down the hall. Norah, Pia and I raced out into the hallway, where almost everyone on the floor had converged. Kat was there, looking pissed off. She asked what had happened and someone said Andrew showed up really drunk and had thrown the coffee table at Kevin, then threw a chair into the wall, which is what made the hole. Everyone resolved into small groups: Jenny, Barbara, Becky, Monica, and Evan in the lounge; Hannah, Michelle, Karl, and Trace in the hall in front of Hannah and Michelle's room; and Norah and Pia in their room. Kat went away with the other RA who showed up to deal with the problem. I went into Pia and Norah's room and shut the door. The Indigo Girls swelled loudly from next door. I said, "What's up with that?" Norah said, "They do that every night at about this time." (It was about 2 a.m.). I rolled my eyes. Pia said, "I'm really glad that you're not really tight with them," pointing next door to Hannah and Michelle's room. I said, "I am Switzerland." Pia said, "Ever since the day I met Hannah—yuck!" Norah said, "And they never clean the bathroom!" I said they were going to call the police on Andrew for assault. Pia immediately said, "Thanks for getting him out of our room." Norah said, "We didn't know what to do, he just came in and laid on the floor." I sat in Norah's desk chair and said everyone was freaking out over nothing. Norah said, "Andrew is such a faker." I said, "I thought I was the only one who knew that he was faking!" Norah said, "Those girls don't know." I assumed she meant the B's (Becky, Jenny, Barbara, and Monica), and agreed that they have probably not seen enough drunk people to know what they were seeing.

As with most social events, the course of my interaction with Pia and Norah was largely unexpected and unplanned. When I walked into Pia and Norah's room, I had been planning to say something about Andrew. However, the music from next door was so loud that I spoke without thinking and in a disparaging tone of voice. I interpreted Norah's tone of voice in her response to me—"they do that every night at about this time"—as long suffering. I commiserated with her with the physical act of rolling my eyes. Pia immediately responded by saying she was glad I wasn't "really tight" with them. My response, "I am Switzerland," was an attempt at a joke and an attempt to literally tell them that I wanted to think of myself as neutral—that is, as not particularly close with anyone. I do not know how Pia and Norah apprehended my comment, but they both immediately began complaining about Michelle and Hannah. Something about the situation as it stood at that moment seemed to make it appropriate for them to complain about their neighbors to me, perhaps because I had complained first. When I changed the subject, Pia thanked me, then Norah and I had an exchange about Andrew and the Bs. During this exchange, I recognized that Norah was talking to me about what she thought about others, which she had never done before; in fact, we were having a conversation about what we thought about other people.

This interaction reminds me of Sahlins's "structure of the conjuncture," in which new types of social interactions lead to social change (1981). The types of talk in that exchange were different from our previous exchanges, and seemed to contain more personal information, especially thoughts and opinions about others. After that night, Pia and Norah began engaging in some of the behaviors with me that others had—sharing food, asking for advice, and "problem" and "feeling" talk. The different types of talk used in that interaction seemed to me to have opened the door for the establishment of relationships of some sort between us. Future interactions now had the potential to be further instances in these relationships, whereas they never had before.

Before I turn to my case study, I would like to elaborate further on the theoretical framework with which I am attempting to analyze the data I collected. In the next two sections, I will discuss what I mean by "education" and also examine the popular and scholarly discourses of friendship in more detail.

EDUCATION, OR INSTRUCTED ACTION

As theorists since G. H. Mead have suggested (1934), it takes three "people" to construct cultural meaning out of any given situation. Arensberg (1977) suggested that this idea was of particular importance for anthropologists: "Cultural anthropology must consider three or more persons: the transmitter, the learner, and the sanctioner of cumulative tradition"(120). It is interesting to note that in this statement Arensberg terms the second person the "learner." This is somewhat surprising for anthropology because traditional discourses of culture transmission in this discipline have tended toward theories of socialization or enculturation and have not generally embraced the language of education. Even those working in the field of education have tended to use ideas of socialization and enculturation, which posit an internalization of beliefs and values. But in the last 30 years, Bourdieu's (1977/1990) contention that students "possess" cultural capital has begun to be challenged, and the province of "education" has begun to be more widely extended outside the school. Mehan, for example, suggests that participation in a local culture is a more helpful description of individual action in situated activity than possession, partially because it allows for what is observable: the same people behaving differently in different contexts. Mehan (1987) notes that "effective participation in the classroom entails recognizing different contexts for interaction, and producing behavior that is appropriate for each context" (124).

In this issue, we take seriously Cremin's (1976) definition of education and his contention that it occurs in many contexts other than the school. In his discussion, Cremin makes it clear that the operative word in this definition is deliberate and contrasts this with academic discourse, which has long treated the educative aspects of institutions other than schools as "incidental." Taken together, Mehan (1987) and Cremin suggest that interaction in all contexts has the potential to be educative and that the nature of such educative interaction is the production of behavior appropriate to the particular context. In a discussion of situated activity in context, Lave reinforces this idea with her suggestion that "participation in everyday life may be thought of as a process of changing understanding in practice, that is, as learning" (Chaiklin and Lave, 6).

If we accept this line of thinking, it appears that we may find "learners" everywhere; any person going about his or her daily business may become a learner at any time. Who, then, are the "teachers" in everyday life? This article expands on the notion that education is a process that occurs between people in a variety of relationships and in a variety of contexts. However, in explicating this theoretical notion, we cannot ignore that teacher and learner, in American culture, carry a particular weight in the discourses in which they are found. Words like "friend" or "lover" carry a different kind of weight. To the extent that we consider that all human interactions are built on general processes that we are trying to illuminate, we must briefly face one particular cultural arbitrary, that of America, that makes it difficult to account for some of the most common of possible interactions. It is all the more difficult that both the teacher/student and the friend/friend relationships, as constituted in the United States, are so extremely sensitive as to have been a matter of state concern from the onset. On one side, particular legitimacy is granted to particular persons at particular times and within particular institutional hierarchies to do certain labeled things to other persons. That is, in state-licensed schools, state-certified teachers, controlled by administrators and elected officials during class time, interact in specific ways with people thereby made into students. The very same people at other times may be parents and children to each other, friends, and even lovers (though this can be very controversial indeed!). Above all, the teacher/student relationship is asymmetrical. As Varenne and Kelly (1976) noted, teachers can and should be friendly with students, but they cannot be "friends."

Conversely, friendship is a relationship between equals and thus does not lend itself easily to the vocabulary of education with respect to teaching and learning. Cultural assumptions about relationships of sentiment do not grant legitimacy to deliberate attempts to change understanding between "friends." And yet, I observed such deliberate attempts on a regular basis.

The point here is not to collapse the distinction between teacher and friend. It is not to point at its cultural roots, nor otherwise deconstruct either teaching or friendship. Rather, it is to search for a better way to account for the properties of friendship as a practical, social activity in the United States. This is what led me to build on Mehan, Lave, and others to explore the implications of focusing on what people actually do when they find themselves in a relationship of friendship—that is, for definitional purposes, the kind of relationship in which the question, "We are friends, aren't we?" eventually controls everything that happens.

Asking the question, answering it, and justifying one's action in terms of any of the discourses that will be mutually accepted as answering it (even if negatively) together constitute, from my point of view, a complex interactional field maintained by what I find useful to refer to as "instructions" (Garfinkel 2002). These instructions, as a set and over the course of many specific conversations, educate the participants about friendship, love, and the vicissitudes of both. As noted earlier, it was Cremin (1976) who first suggested that peer groups can be sites of deliberate education. It is particularly apt that he referred to the educative activity of young people as "the exchange of enthusiasms," because the students I observed often displayed great zeal in their attempts to change one another's understanding, particularly in the context of romance. This was most frequently accomplished by the indexical referencing of cultural ideals, or stereotypes: people not only told each other what to do and what not to do, and they told each other why what they were doing was right or wrong. Despite the difficulties caused by using the language of education in this context, I refer to the work that the residents of the dorm did together as their "sentimental education," an educational process in which they found themselves alternatively in the roles of both teacher and student.

WHAT DOES "FRIENDSHIP" LOOK LIKE?

Historically and popularly, the relationship of friendship is presented, when it is brought to discursive expression, as (1) sentimental, or based on personal sentiment or feeling and (2) ideally one of equality; there are no inherent power differentials between friends, as there are between teachers and students. Current anthropological and mainstream sociological writing on the topic of friendship tends to engage the term in the first sense, as ultimately reflective of the internal state of the individual; people who feel an emotion like caring toward one another are friends. In this kind of literature, "friendship" is rarely, if ever, defined, being more commonly treated as if some definition of it exists. For example, in a recent volume of sociological studies of friendship, the focus of the volume is said to be "how social structural or cultural variables influence an individual's friendship behavior" (Adams and Allan 1998, 6). Other academic studies of friendship elaborate on matters related to it in common discourse, for example, how well friends "support" one another (Oliker 1989). In a passage from The Anthropology of Friendship, we are told that "From our friends, we hope to derive emotional support, advice and material help in times of need" (Bell and Coleman 1999, 1). It appears that neither the lack of a definition of friendship nor the assumption of some kind of a norm for friendship behavior is expected to pose a problem for the reader. However, few of these studies, even the ones that purport to use empirical data, attempt to engage with what such friendship relationships might consist of or look like in practice.

One exception to this is found in Moffatt's (1989) study of the "friendliness" that he observed between students he studied at Rutgers University in 1981. He called friendliness "the fundamental code of etiquette among the students" (44), while explaining that because friendliness is etiquette, "it does not always mean that the person who is acting friendly wants or expects to be friends" (44). He also suggested that friendliness can be defined in terms of particular observable behaviors:

To act friendly is to give regular abbreviated performances of the standard behaviors of real friendship—to look pleased and happy when you meet someone, to put on the all-American friendly smile, to acknowledge the person you are meeting by name (preferably by the first name, shortened version), to make casual body contact, to greet the person with one of the two or three conventional queries about the state of their "whole self" ("How are you?" "How's it goin'?" "What's new?") (43–44, italics original).

The point on which Moffatt and I differ is his contention that "the standard behaviors of real friendship" are more elaborate versions of the behaviors of "friendliness." On the contrary, my research suggests that what takes place between people who refer to one another as friends does not always look like friendly behavior. Moffatt's classification of friendliness as social etiquette, or behaviors appropriate to particular social situations, however, is quite useful to this study. In this article, I propose to show that friendship may be defined as behaviors appropriate to particular contexts, even when those behaviors are not entirely friendly.

In idealized discourse, friendship in America is a relationship between equals. Power dynamics between people in such relationships are rarely dealt with theoretically because of the clash of ideals involved: although the term "peer pressure" exists, it is almost never analyzed in detail as an everyday practice, but rather as an aberration—a "mis-" behavior. The apparent ubiquity (from my observations) of nonideal friendship behavior in actual practice suggests that it might be more theoretically fruitful to approach this behavior as an inherent part of the relationship. Instead of dismissing this behavior as abnormal, we could ask how these behaviors are used by students who call each other friends as tools, both supportively and coercively, in the course of achieving those very relationships (and other relationships of sentiment). Studies of friendship in practice are few and far between, and the theoretical clash of ideals often causes those who study relationships of sentiment to have a difficult time making sense of their results. An example of this is found in the seminal book Educated in Romance, in which anthropologists Holland and Eisenhart (1990) stated that they set out to study "why so few American college women were going into the high-paying traditionally male-dominated fields of math and science" (3). Their focus was on "how the culturally constructed world of romance relates to women's school careers" (9). The data they gathered mirrored my findings in two respects: first, that women's peer relationships are significant to their romantic relationships and, second, that women behave coercively toward one another in the context of both these relationships.

Holland and Eisenhart (1990) suggested that students constrain one another to participate in what they call the "culture of romance," which they explain as consisting of "constant evaluations of [the students'] worth on the basis of their sexual appeal to men" (21). Rather than pursuing how these constraints might be achieved in practice, however, the authors suggest that this is so because peers become "mediators" of patriarchy: "We came to see that for women of the age we studied, it was peers, not school or community authorities, who were the primary mediators of gender oppression and patriarchy" (20).

Holland and Eisenhart (1990) found coercion between women, and they related this coercion to student concern with romance. The invocation of patriarchy to explain this coercion makes sense in the context of American culture, because without empirical data on the women's relationships in practice, they had no other conceptual tools to use to explain coercive behavior between people who refer to one another as friends. Indeed, Holland and Eisenhart's difficulty, it seems, stems largely from this uncontested ideal of friendship in academic and popular discourse. They described the relationships between the women they studied as not fully trusting, supportive, or caring, and smacking of "utility"—all of which are antithetical to ideals of friendship in American academic and popular discourse. They seem to contend that because these relationships do not fit the ideal of friendship, they are "weak and secondary" to the women's "primary" relationships (which are posited to be those with men).

My theoretical framework would make it hard for me to make judgments about how the women in my study ranked their relationships of sentiment, although to say that romantic relationships are more romantic than friendships (from the standpoint of cultural ideals, that is) seems hard to argue against. However, the women in my study who called each other friends and deliberately attempted to change one another's behavior were in relationships with one another that had continuity over time and could not be ignored. Whether their feelings for men were more important to them cannot be answered using my methodology. What I can say, though, is that the women in relationships of friendship with one another continually sought out one another's company, day after day, consistently returning to participate in those relationships even when the behavior they faced from their friends was less than friendly. This leads me to believe that this behavior is not aberrant but appropriate to the relationship of friendship, and that the activity of educating one another about "romance"—in the context of those relationships of friendship—is legitimate and appropriate behavior for American college students.

CASE STUDY: JENNY, NORAH, PIA, KARL, AND ERIC

I lived on the fifth floor of Tower Dorm, a freshman-only dormitory on the campus of Big Fir College, for one school year. All 22 students on the floor were first-year students, with the exception of the resident advisor (RA), who was a sophomore. As is done at most residential colleges, students were assigned to rooms randomly, so they had to make new relationships with the people that they found at school when they arrived. Both the students and the college appeared to expect these new students to make friendships with one another, and indeed the students quickly "buddied up," most often with their roommates (with some exceptions). By the end of the first week, observable groupings had been established based simply on the amount of time spent together. This case study focuses on one of these groupings in particular. Jenny lived on one side of fifth floor in a cul-de-sac behind the kitchen with four other girls. These girls spent all their time together and became known on the floor as "the kitchen girls." Pia and Norah were roommates who lived on the other side of the floor and did not associate with "the kitchen girls," and in fact had been heard (by me) to make mildly disparaging remarks about them. This configuration prevailed for the better part of three months, until in December two events occurred that seemed to change things around on the floor somewhat.

One night I went over to Pia and Norah's room and saw Nick, a boy who also lived on the floor, in Pia's bed with Pia. I then walked over to my side of the floor and saw a strange boy coming out of Jenny's room. A few minutes later, Jenny told me that this was her "on-again, off-again boyfriend" from home, Karl, and that things were "on again." I asked Jenny if she knew about Pia and Nick, and she said that she had been "enlisted" by Pia to "help get them together" last week, because "Nick was being an idiot." Jenny told me a story about herself and the rest of "the kitchen girls," saying publicly that Nick should move into Monica's old room (Monica had just moved out). Jenny said that Pia had gotten upset with them, and in the course of finding out why Pia was upset, Jenny had discovered that Pia was interested in Nick and had been enlisted by her to help.

On top of the information concerning new "romances" between Nick and Pia, and Jenny and Karl (whom I had never heard of before), I was surprised to hear that Pia and Jenny had had a conversation. I was particularly interested that Pia had seemingly attempted to forge an alliance with Jenny by asking for her help with Nick. Shortly thereafter, I witnessed an interaction between Jenny and Pia for the first time. Four of us were sitting in the lounge, and Evan said, "Is Karl still here?" Jenny said, "No, he left earlier. I sent him home because his computer was in the front seat of his car and I was worried about it." Pia shook her head and said, "I don't approve of him." Jenny said something I couldn't hear. Pia said, "I never have approved of him." Jenny said, "Why not?" Pia said, "I've heard your stories . . . I don't like these on-again, off-again boyfriends." Jenny said, "It's my fault . . . I'm the one who calls it off . . . we have these huge fights and then I leave and then I come crawling back." Pia said, "If it was meant to be, you shouldn't fight like that."

In her final comment, Pia indexed a moral "truth" to sanction Jenny's relationship with Karl. It is notable that Pia does not simply use words that specify "right" or "wrong" behavior. Rather, she uses a particular phrase often found in Western discourses of romantic love such as fairy tales: "meant to be." Pia's statement to Jenny implied (to me, at least) that the reported "fighting" between Jenny and Karl suggests that their relationship is not meant to be. Because ethnomethodology suggests that there is no real moral order other than that which members make relevant to one another in the production of local order, Pia's invocation of a moral sanction on Jenny's behavior thus is the moral order that Jenny is then and there being held accountable to; it is, at that moment and for all practical purposes, that which she cannot ignore. Jenny in fact did not ignore Pia's comments, but rather proceeded to explain her actions as if she had been called upon to do so.

During the third quarter of the school year, after winter break, Jenny, Pia, Norah, Nick, and Pia's ex-boyfriend Eric spent a great deal of time together either in Pia and Norah's room or in the lounge. Jenny spent much less time with "the kitchen girls" than she had previously. During this time, Pia and Norah began to make negative remarks about Karl (Jenny's "on-again boyfriend") to Jenny on a regular basis in my presence, usually when the four of us were spending time in Pia and Norah's room. One night, Jenny told us that Karl made candles, and Pia responded that he must be gay. Shortly thereafter, Jenny, Norah, and I were hanging out in Norah's room when the following exchange took place: Jenny complained that Pia thinks Karl is gay. I asked why, and she said because he makes candles. But she said she likes it when he makes candles because then she gets candles. Norah said, "I don't approve of your boyfriend either."

At the beginning of the next quarter, I was sitting in Pia and Norah's room with Jenny when the following exchange occurred: Pia said, "Do you still have a boyfriend?" to Jenny. Jenny said, "I didn't talk to him at all over break." Then Pia told Norah that Jenny got it on with Eric. She said she called Jenny one morning and Eric was there in her room. [I asked where she called from and she said from her room, she was just too lazy to walk over there, so she called]. She said that Jenny and Eric had "kissed all night, and then had sex . . . without the sex part." We laughed. Pia said that Jenny then told Eric he was too clingy and that was that. Jenny left the room and I asked Pia why Jenny wasn't into Eric. She said she didn't know, but that Jenny said he was too clingy and that she wasn't ready for that, "Which she probably isn't," Pia said. Pia said that she felt bad for Eric, though, because "he really liked her." She said, "He doesn't want to hang out with you all the time, but he wanted to hang out with her every minute . . . he said he hadn't felt that way about anyone else." Pia said she didn't know what was going on with Jenny, because she was supposed to break up with Karl over break. I said, "Did you tell her to do that?" She said yes. "But," Pia said, "Jenny says she didn't even talk to Karl over break, and I don't think they talked much before break. I don't think Jenny has a boyfriend, if they never talk." Norah said Jenny never mentioned a boyfriend for most of the first quarter, then suddenly she had a boyfriend of three years.

In this statement, Pia tells what I call a "special" story about Jenny and Eric. Special stories were common to small-group talk situations on campus and seemed to me to be used by students in a particular way. These stories invoke the "specialness" of another, as Pia's comment above does when she reports that Eric said he "hadn't felt that way about anyone else." Special stories seem to me to be foundational in that they are the first story about a potential relationship, and they lay the groundwork for future stories about the relationship. Their usage in a conversation between a particular group of people opens the door to the relationship having a future as an ongoing construction of that group of people. They are statements of intent, in a sense, to which members hold one another accountable over time. In the previous excerpt, Norah makes a suggestion that discredits Jenny's attachment to Karl. Her implicit suggestion is that if the relationship were "real," Jenny would have mentioned it earlier. Pia concurs and suggests that an indicator of "reality" in a relationship is the amount of time a couple spends talking to one another. Pia and Norah seemed to me, in this conversation, to be building a case against Jenny and Karl's relationship and for a relationship between Jenny and Eric. A few days, later I was driving to the grocery store with Jenny: On the way [to the store], Jenny said something negative about Karl. I said, "When was the last time you talked to him?" She said Spring Break. I said, "I thought you said you hadn't talked to him at all over break." She said, "I lied because I didn't feel like getting grilled by Pia."

A few days later, Jenny told me that she liked Eric but didn't want to go out with him because she didn't want to hurt Karl. Later that same night, my field notes report the following: "Jenny said she's not going to say anything to Pia (about Eric) because Pia would just yell at her. I said let me guess, Pia would say you should break up with Karl and go out with Eric. Jenny said yes."

One evening, Pia made another comment about Karl being gay. Jenny said, "You don't know him." Pia said, "I would be all for it if I felt that he made you happy, but you don't seem happy, and you don't really seem to like him, so I can't support the relationship." Jenny said, "I think we'll get married." There was a silence and then the subject was changed.

As these examples show, Pia and Norah continued to make negative comments about Jenny's relationship with Karl over the course of several months. They also continued to promote the notion that Jenny should be dating Eric, and their coercion was not limited to the verbal. One night I arrived at the dorm just in time to witness the following scene:

There was a commotion in the kitchen. Pia and Norah were standing in the kitchen trying to hold the door to the cul-de-sac closed. They were laughing and screaming and slamming the door repeatedly. I asked what was going on and Pia yelled, "We're trying to get two people to have sex!" Jenny and Eric were visible every time the door opened and they were smiling a little, but not saying anything.

A few days after the incident of the door slamming, Jenny told me that she broke up with Karl. After that, she began spending a lot of time in Eric's room, and I often observed them being physical with one another, frequently kissing on the lips in public. Throughout the six months during which these events took place, Jenny frequently stated that she did not want to have a "serious" relationship with Eric, but she ended the year in what appeared to be just such a relationship.

WHAT PIA AND NORAH "TAUGHT" JENNY ABOUT "LOVE"

There is no doubt that Pia and Norah deliberately attempted to change Jenny's understanding with regard to which person they considered to be an appropriate dating partner for her. In the course of their normal everyday actions together during this time, Pia and Norah continually made a case against the legitimacy of Jenny and Karl as a couple and for the legitimacy of Jenny and Eric as a couple. Jenny defended herself creatively against some of Pia and Norah's sanctions, yet ultimately she became part of the couple that they had wanted her to be in, which she had attempted to avoid. Could it be said, then, that they were the teachers and she was the learner? And that the sentimental education of Jenny was that going out with Eric was preferred to going out with Karl? Perhaps, but only in the context of Jenny's relationships with Pia and Norah.

If education is a commonplace, everyday activity, it is also local and specific; it occurs in certain contexts. Those contexts are themselves the specific productions of local history; Pia and Norah were only able to educate Jenny about her romantic life because of their continued participation in friendship relationships with one another. If we follow Garfinkel, (1967; 2002) social order can be said to constitute itself as interaction occurs, and interaction occurs on an ongoing basis. Thus, the traditional definition of education as a process with a certain amount of finality, in which information is transferred and after which a person can be said to have learned something, is less useful to a social reality in which interactions and relationships are ongoing. In such a social reality, education itself must also be a continuing process, because information, even the same information as previously used, will be used as needed in every new situation. The students I observed were in sentimental relationships with each other that were ongoing. Thus, their sentimental education was an ongoing process that constituted itself at the same time that it was revealed. Jenny's, Pia's, and Norah's friendships with one another were never complete, were always ongoing, and required work to maintain.

And Pia and Norah created significant constraints within which Jenny had to work in order to continue her relationships with them. As the excerpts I chose showed, Jenny displayed creative responses to these constraints, from simply not telling Pia certain pieces of information in order to avoid getting grilled, to making responses that closed the interaction (like, "I think we'll get married")—temporarily. What is interesting for a study of friendship, however, is that no one at any point in any of these conversations suggested that the subject matter or the unfriendly way the conversations proceeded were inappropriate. The conversations, as constitutive of the social order, did not run into major problems, nor did the order break down at any time. Indeed, during all these reported events, students appeared to proceed as if what was happening were normal, ordinary, and unproblematic instances of friends spending time together. Even the door-slamming incident did not appear to be treated as anomic, and it was not even commented on later (to my knowledge). It is because of this lack of contention about what participants could contest, and the grounds of the contest, that I suggest that the types of talk and work displayed in the actions of these girls in these particular situations were acceptable, for all practical purposes, as successful achievements of instances of the sentimental relationships between them. In other words, the presence of sanctions, correctives, or coercion in these instances did not keep them from being recognizable instances of friendship for the participants and may in fact have made them just that.

CONCLUSION

The moral of this story, for me, is that people in the United States construct events in their lives through the educative process that is social interaction with significant others. Specifically, they find out about their own "friendships" and "loves" in social interaction with those significant others with whom they are having the relationships. Whereas people may be said to "know" about love simply by living in a culture, there remains the sticky problem of what happens when abstract knowledge confronts everyday practice. While some would argue that behavior is a simple application of prior "knowledge" to the situation at hand, my research suggests that in practice, this is not the whole story. I agree with Bourdieu (1977/1990) that people are not automatons, blindly following social rules written in the ether. However, his substitution of dispositions as an explanatory structure for human behavior is also unsatisfactory because it focuses our attention solely on the individual and because dispositions can only be determined when the subject is inactive; a disposition is an ideal state. In practice, things are much messier. Humans certainly know things. People are certainly individuals. What I argue here, however, is that to understand human behavior, we must elevate social interaction to its rightful place at the center of our inquiry. "What are we doing here?" can never be fully understood by asking one person, because "What are we doing here?" is a negotiation, an ongoing deliberation between participants; the pushing and pulling they engage in is what I would like to refer to as their education of one another.

If we follow the common assumption that knowledge drives or causes behavior, we immediately hit a methodological snag: it is impossible to determine which pieces of knowledge are being used when observing humans in interaction. In addition, once we begin observing behavior, we note that what is going on is not always immediately clear. For example, my observations that behavior between people who call each other friends does not always appear friendly. What we know about friendship (which must, in its most universal or shared state, be an ideal) may not directly translate, then, to a college dorm environment. Instead, I noticed over time that the types of talk engaged in by groups of students who called each other friends in the dorm routinely involved discussions of romances and often consisted of direct attempts to change one another's behavior, criticisms, and critiques. These "unfriendly" behaviors were so ubiquitous that they seemed to be an indication themselves of friendship among the participants. I do not assume, however, that the participants in these relationships knew before they arrived at college that this was how friends behaved. On the contrary, I believe that these particular students educated one another over the course of this first year of school into this particular friendship behavior and then held one another accountable to that construction.

The aim of this collection of articles is to refocus attention on the social work of education; that is, that education is social and involves work. It is for this reason that we do not concern ourselves much with "learning," or with the notion of habitus, or what might be termed "accumulated knowledge." It is my contention, at least, that this particular case study illustrates that whatever "accumulated knowledge" Jenny might have had about "love" upon arrival at Big Fir cannot be relied on to fully explain her interactions with Pia and Norah. In other words, anything Jenny might have been said to have known about love is not enough when we look at the powerful and turbulent interactions between Jenny, Pia, and Norah; prior knowledge does not help her or us, the observers, to guess how her actions would be made specifically and constantly relevant to her relationships with these two girls, nor how she would be held accountable to these particular friendships and these particular loves. This case study shows how particular friendships and loves were enforced on Jenny, socially, in the unique, unforeseeable, unrepeatable way of situated practical action. I would not disagree that Jenny knew things about love at the end of this year that were products of the local and specific history of that floor. However, I can't guarantee that what she knew would be fully relevant to what she found waiting for her at college the next year. In a similar vein, what I knew about making friends in 30 years of living did not allow me to automatically make friends with Pia and Norah. Social interaction, therefore, cannot be approached backwards, from the standpoint that behavior is based on previously accumulated knowledge. Rather, interaction must be understood as the complex locus of people doing things together: being held accountable, enforcing, and resisting each other. As meaning is made through social interaction, the process of social interaction might be termed an ongoing, deliberate, critical process of finding out what is going on. And people find out by instructing and being instructed by those around them. It is for this reason that we suggest that the focus of our research needs to be shifted from the shaped or transformed individual to the social processes of shaping and transforming.

Note

What I mean by "caught" is central to my understanding of social interaction; one is caught when one is held accountable to something, when one has something—in this case, friendship—enforced upon him or her. As such, being caught is necessarily a social phenomenon.

References

Adams, Rebecca G., and Graham Allan. 1998. Placing friendship in context. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press.

Arensberg, Conrad M. 1977. Generalizing anthropology: The recovery of holism. In Crisis in Anthropology, ed. E. Adamson Hoebel, 109–30. New York: Garland Publishing.

Bell, Sandra, and Simon Coleman, eds. 1999. The anthropology of friendship. Oxford, UK: Berg.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977/1990. Reproduction. London: Sage.

Chaiklin, Seth, and Jean Lave. 1993 Understanding practice. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.

Cremin, Lawrence. 1976. Public education. New York: Basic Books.

Garfinkel, Harold. 1967. Studies in ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Garfinkel, Harold. 2002. Ethnomethodology's program: Working out Durkheim's aphorism. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Holland, Dorothy C., and Margaret A. Eisenhart. 1990 Educated in romance. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.

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Mead, G. H. 1934. Mind, self and society. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.

Mead, G. H. 1987. Language and schooling. In Interpretive ethnography of education: At home and abroad, ed. G. Spindler and L. Spindler, 109–36. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Moffatt, Michael. 1989. Coming of age in New Jersey: College and American culture. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Univ. Press.

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Schneider, David. 1968/1980. American kinship: A cultural account. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.

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Cite This Article as: Teachers College Record Volume 109 Number 7, 2007, p. 1682-1704

http://www.tcrecord.org ID Number: 13818, Date Accessed: 7/10/2007 1:47:20 PM

Q&A: Former Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings Discusses the Impact of Her Commission

Back in 2005, Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings created a commission to craft a vision for the future of higher education. These days, she's running her own public-policy consulting firm and serving as a senior adviser to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The Chronicle caught up with her this month.

Q. The commission found that higher education in the United States needs to improve in "dramatic ways," changing from a system primarily based on reputation to one based on performance. Has this happened?

A. Not enough. What I'm proud of is that it has kick-started the conversation. Initially, there was a lot of blowback. It was controversial, to say the least. I think it hit a nerve and was a wake-up call. Certainly, there has been some activity and some action. I am most impressed and pleased by some in the philanthropic community-—Lumina, Gates, others—who really understand what the commission was saying.

But clearly the pace has been too slow. What has really changed is the anxiety people feel about the value proposition—it's more expensive, they're less clear about value, can you get a job when you're done? The economy has restricted. The issues are more acute now than they were then.

Q. Are we doing a better job of measuring student-learning outcomes?

A. A baby-step better. I am encouraged by states beginning to talk about it. The philanthropic community has seeded some important work. There is starting to be some acceptance, fueled by public demand and anxiety about affordability.

Q. Your "action plan" for the commission's report focused on access, affordability, and accountability. On the issue of access, the commission found that college attendance was limited by inadequate preparation, lack of information about college opportunities, and financial barriers. Is college more accessible today than it was five years ago? What has improved, and which barriers remain?

A. Clearly, we've been working on affordability. You can't deny some progress has been made with the increased Pell Grant, but prices continue to be staggering. High-school preparation continues to be chronically broken—that's one thing the academy can agree on. They need more money, and kids are not prepared enough when they come out of high school.

Q. You said at the time that there was little to no information on why costs were so high and what students were getting in return. Is there better information out there now?

A. A little bit better—in particular, in cases where states are focused on it. But it's not terribly powerful yet. But when I think about it, we just celebrated the 25th anniversary of "A Nation at Risk." It took time for that thinking to take hold, and we're still working on it. I feel proud that the commission brought some attention to it. Are we there yet? Hell no.

Q. You also said that no current ranking system of colleges and universities directly measured the most critical point, student performance and learning. How much data do we have now and how useful is it to consumers and policy makers?

A. That's the weakest area. Though obviously the Voluntary System of Accountability has several hundred institutions. From the institutional level, not much progress has been made. I do think people are more tuned in to why the defensiveness, what's the problem, what are we afraid of? But what we do know is not terribly flattering.

Q. The commission titled its report "A Test of Leadership." If the last five years were a test of leadership, what grade would you give colleges?

A. Incomplete.

Q. Did the commission achieve what you'd hoped, and what is its legacy?

A. Clearly, I wish that we had done more faster. The chief legacy is raising the issues, putting the elephant on the table and gaining additional allies for the cause. It was kind of lonely out there five years ago.

To the extent there is policy movement, it's happening at the state level. We don't have the luxury of lush resources. We have to do more with less, so the silver lining of the scarce-resource cloud is that it may cause people to have to do something different.

It's not enough to rest on your laurels and your reputation any longer. And I think that sort of thinking has been precipitated by the commission and the aftermath of the commission.

http://chronicle.com/article/Q-A-Former-Secretary-of/129065/

The Unwitting Damage Done by the Spellings Commission

Jon Krause for The Chronicle

By Robert Zemsky

I ended my service as a member of Margaret Spellings's Commission on the Future of American Higher Education on the phone from Bangkok, formally assenting to sign "A Test of Leadership: Charting the Future of U.S. Higher Education," the commission's report. Only in retrospect have I understood just how fitting that conclusion was for a grand adventure that ended with little more than a whimper.

In the final arguments over the text of that report—arguments that often pitted the commission's higher-education members against its chairman, Charles Miller, what had come to matter most was the tone rather than the truly modest substance of our conclusions. Each succeeding draft had become more sanitized, more tolerant of ambiguity, more ready to admit a diversity of opinion. In the end we produced a report with too many recommendations, too many words, and too many distracting sidebars to persuade colleges and universities to do much of anything differently.

What Miller had wanted was a forceful report, much like "A Nation at Risk," that would call attention to higher education's "really bad flaws." His way forward meant developing a tough set of metrics measuring the outcomes that higher education could not ignore—much as elementary and secondary education could no longer ignore the metrics that No Child Left Behind put in place, first in Texas and later in the nation as a whole. Miller had played an important role in that effort and had taken the lead in getting the University of Texas to develop a similarly tough set of metrics for its campuses. The University of Texas Board of Regents still lists first among Miller's accomplishments as board chair the "creation of state-of-the-art higher-education accountability system."

For Miller the key was a proposed unit-record system on the one hand and, on the other, a test remarkably like the Collegiate Learning Assessment, which he believed could measure what students at a given institution were and were not learning. Both ideas died aborning—the former blocked by Congress, the latter so watered down in the text of the commission's report as to be unrecognizable.

I originally thought that Miller had lacked a coherent strategy for putting in place what his commission recommended—that he saw as his principal task getting higher education's attention. The way to do that was to use strong language, forcefully identifying the enterprise's many flaws and broken parts. I have since understood that I was wrong. Miller had entered the fray with a Plan B that, in the end, would provide the Spellings Commission's most lasting and perhaps its only impact on American higher education.

Plan B was the federalization of the process by which colleges and universities are accredited and their students become eligible for federal student-aid programs. During the life of the commission, I was often perplexed by Miller's disparaging of that process. For most colleges, accreditation is a once-every-10-years exercise that seldom if ever touches the sinews of the institution. In "A Test of Leadership," the commission described accreditation as a "large and complex public-private system of federal, state, and private regulators, [that] has significant shortcomings. ... [D]espite increased attention by accreditors to learning assessments, they continue to play largely an internal role. Accreditation reviews are typically kept private, and those that are made public still focus on process reviews more than bottom-line results for learning or costs."

But nowhere in our final report, nor in any of the informal conversations in which I engaged as a commissioner, do I recall talking about accreditation as a federal lever for regulating higher education.

That, however, was Miller's Plan B. Most of us, I think, were surprised by the announcement by the Department of Education following our last meeting that the federal negotiated rule-making process by which accrediting agencies were certified would henceforth "examine whether any proposals made by the higher-education commission can be put in place through federal regulation." That November, Secretary Spellings made explicit what her and Miller's Plan B option entailed. The headline in The Chronicle told the tale: "Spellings Wants to Use Accreditation as a Cudgel."

By then it was clear that neither the commission nor our report would spark a general reform of higher education. What was left to the secretary was a largely untried strategy of using the Department of Education's suzerainty over the accreditation process to establish the specific criteria for determining whether individual institutions were providing a higher education of sufficient quality to enable their students to participate in the federal government's student-aid programs.

In the end, it was a strongly worded letter from Senator Lamar Alexander—a former U.S. secretary of education, former governor, former president of the University of Tennessee—that put the kibosh on this first attempt to put into effect what I have come to think of as the Plan B option. It was Congress, and not the department, the senator reminded the secretary, that had both the authority and the responsibility for regulating higher education.

Then the Democrats took control of the Department of Education, with different ideas and a different set of targets—principally for-profit colleges and universities—but with a similar willingness to experiment with federalized processes in order to change higher education.

Instead of metrics for measuring educational quality, two quite different tasks—establishing a standard for determining how much graduates needed to earn to say their educations yielded "gainful employment," and defining the credit hour—became the focus of the department's rule-making. And where Miller and Spellings had come up short, Robert Shireman, then-deputy undersecretary of education, and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan succeeded, putting in place a regulatory environment that provides the department with a broad role in determining what kinds of higher education are eligible for the federal government's $100-billion-plus investment in student financial aid.

Almost immediately, accreditation was changed. Both irritated and alarmed, the accrediting agencies have done what bureaucracies under attack always do—they have stiffened, making their rules and procedures more formulaic, their dealings with the institutions they are responsible for accrediting more formal and by-the-book, and the documentation of each of the steps they had taken to comply with the department's new standards and criteria more precise and detailed. For a college or university now up for reaccreditation, the safe way forward is to treat the process as what it has become: an audit in which it is best to volunteer as little as possible.

I now better understand the unintended irony of Miller's oft-repeated charge that accreditation has stifled innovation.

Among the myriad forces stifling innovation across higher education, it is actually his and Margaret Spellings's creation of an unprecedented and hence untried federal regulatory process that today helps discourage all but the most foolhardy colleges from trying anything different. It was not, to be sure, what they intended, but unfortunately it is what we got.

Robert Zemsky is a professor of education and chairman of the Learning Alliance for Higher Education at the University of Pennsylvania.

Sara Goldrick-Rab

The massive expansion of the community college over the last century substantially increased participation in American higher education, particularly among individuals with limited opportunities for education beyond high school because of academic difficulties, financial constraints, and other factors. But strides in increasing access have not met with much success in terms of matching students to credentials; in fact, efforts to broaden opportunities may have hindered efforts to increase completion rates. A substantial proportion of students attending public 2-year colleges enroll with the intention to earn credentials yet make little progress toward a certificate or degree (Bailey, Leinbach, & Jenkins, 2006). For example, within 6 years of transitioning to college only slightly more than one third of community college entrants complete a credential of any kind (Calcagno, Bailey, Jenkins, Kienzl, & Leinbach, 2006).

Furthermore, although the open-door policy that community colleges embrace is intended to democratize opportunities, completion remains correlated with socioeconomic advantage (McIntosh & Rouse, 2009). In fact, individuals from middle-class backgrounds may incur the greatest benefits from the community college and in particular its transfer function (Dougherty, 1994; Leigh & Gill, 2003; Rouse, 1995, 1998).

This review examines studies from social science, education, and policy over the last 25 years that identify contributors to community college success. The conceptual approach taken emphasizes the intertwining roles of three levels of influence: the macro-level opportunity structure; institutional practices; and the social, economic, and academic attributes students bring to college. The purpose is to clarify the multiple sources of difficulties that community colleges face before deciding on solutions.

Although practitioners often attribute poor completion rates to the numerous "deficiencies" that students bring to community college, this review shows that policies affecting the capacity of community colleges to serve students are also important. Crafting more effective responses requires reforms at multiple levels and cannot be achieved with either student- or institution-focused incentives alone. Several promising practices with empirical support are described, and the review concludes by identifying several areas for future research with the potential to increase the field's scope and utility.

Measuring Community College Student Success

Community colleges are highly regarded for their open admissions policy, which expands opportunities to everyone, regardless of prior advantages or disadvantages. Working learners are welcomed—more than half of 2-year college students are employed, compared with only 37% of 4-year college students. Because prior academic success is not a prerequisite for admission, 61% of students at community colleges take at least one remedial course while in college, and 25% take two or more remedial courses. This means that community college faculty members often take on the hard but necessary task of meeting students where they are and helping to move them to the next academic level (McIntosh & Rouse, 2009; U.S. Department of Education 2008).

This "second-chance" policy serves an essential function in a country where substantial numbers of poor and minority students leave high school without a diploma and even more often without developing strong writing, reading, and math skills. Many of these students focus their college search process on community colleges, constructing a decision between attending that institution or not attending college at all (Roderick, Nagaoka, & Coca, 2009). Fully 58% of all African-American undergraduates and 66% of all Hispanic undergraduates are enrolled in community colleges (Katsinas & Tollefson, 2009). As a result, "there are, for example, more low-income African American and Hispanic students at Bronx Community College alone than there are in the entire Ivy League" (Bailey & Jenkins, 2009). That diversity in both the student population and institutional missions creates challenges for creating and measuring success.

Establishing a Baseline

Open-access institutions are nonselective by definition. This means that students enter with a wide range of goals and expectations, making assessment (and particularly benchmarking) of their outcomes complicated. For example, if success is based on the outcomes of all entrants, performance will be depressed unless success is very broadly defined. By the same token, measuring success only for a select group (e.g., those who indicate degree intentions or achieve credit thresholds) may produce a falsely positive appearance of success while also encouraging access to diminish (e.g., through creaming). Results vary depending on how broadly the pool of potential completers is defined and how success is measured (Adelman, 2005; Bailey et al., 2006; Bradburn, Hearst, & Peng, 2003; Burke, 2004; Dougherty, Hare, & Natow, 2009).

Therefore, descriptions of success in the community college sector must carefully define its terms and conditions and recognize the implications of metrics (American Association of Community Colleges, 2009; Dougherty et al., 2009). However, those caveats do not ameliorate the need to assess success, particularly given a climate of scarce fiscal resources and a push to increase the nation's stock of human capital (Aldeman & Carey, 2009; Hebel, 2009). Those desires for degree completion are echoed in the individuals who enroll at community colleges. Trends in college aspirations indicate a strong presence of a college-going culture in American high schools, with nearly all high school seniors reporting intentions of earning college degrees (Roderick, Nagaoka, & Allensworth, 2006). Ninety percent of high school students indicate that they expect to attend college, even if their career choice does not require it (Schneider and Stevenson, 1999). Compared with the 1970s, 12th graders in 2000 were twice as likely to anticipate earning a bachelor's degree in addition to a 2-year degree (Reynolds, Stewart, MacDonald, & Sischo, 2006). Rates of long-term expectations for earning bachelor's degrees are similarly high among entering community college students, with 70% expecting to earn a bachelor's degree or higher (Bailey et al., 2006).

When they first enroll, community college students report a mix of short-term motivations primarily based on practical considerations and personal enrichment. When not restricted to offer a single reason for attending, 46% report enrolling for personal interest and 42% report seeking job skills. Roughly the same percentage indicate that they are enrolled to earn an associate degree, and 17% want a certificate (Horn & Nevill, 2006). Notably, desires for job skills or personal enrichment do not preclude degree intentions—nearly 80% of students across those two groups expect to earn a credential (Bailey, Jenkins, & Leinbach, 2006). Over one-third of community college students report that they enroll in order to transfer to a 4-year college (Horn & Nevill, 2006).

At the same time, one function of education is to increase students' ambitions for further education, and therefore college attendance itself may enhance educational expectations. One simple measure of success is whether students increase (or decrease) their educational expectations after entering community college. In contrast to a longstanding hypothesis that community college students incur diminished aspirations over time in a process of "cooling out" (Clark, 1960), there is mounting evidence that students' already-high aspirations swell during college in a process some have termed "warming up" (Alexander, Bozick, & Entwisle, 2008). In contrast, there is little support for the idea that students level or reduce their expectations in response to feedback about their academic abilities or planned occupational requirements or as a result of attending community college (Rosenbaum, Deil-Amen, & Person, 2006).

Therefore, conditioning rates of success based on initial measures of expectations or primary reasons for enrollment may be problematic (Bailey et al., 2006). Given that intended outcomes vary over time, some observers suggest that community college success is more appropriately measured with intermediate indicators or "milestones" (Calcagno, Crosta, Bailey, & Jenkins, 2006; Moore, Shulock, & Offenstein, 2009). For example, progress can be assessed based on the completion of course credits (either remedial or nonremedial credits), the percentage of a program completed, or whether a student passes the initial college-level or degree-credit "gateway" courses in writing and mathematics. This approach credits incremental progress and takes into account wide variation in student pathways.

Average Rates of Success

Even with the caveats mentioned here, progress through community college is generally slow, no matter how it is measured. The evidence is clear—among students with stated degree intentions, rates of dropout are high (Bailey et al., 2006). After 3 years just 16% of first-time community college students who began college in 2003 attained a credential of any kind (certificate, associate's degree, and/or bachelor's degree), and another 40% were still enrolled. When students are given 6 years to complete instead of 3, completion rates improve somewhat—for example, 36% of students entering community colleges in 1995 attained a credential by 2001. Moreover, another 17.5% were still enrolled. Although this indicates that completion rates need to account for the pace of progress toward completion, the noncompletion rate (no degree, not enrolled) hovers very close to 50%—even given longer time horizons. Of course, this number decreases when degree completion is measured over a longer period of time (Attewell & Lavin, 2007), but in the aggregate it represents a substantial loss of human capital and resources.

Reviewing the Challenges and Opportunities

What stands in the way of increasing credential attainment among community college students? In pursuit of answers, this review examines 25 years of academic and policy research on community college student persistence.

Methodological Approach

Articles were identified with a search of the Educational Resources Information Center, Education Full Text, and Social Sciences Abstracts using combinations of keywords (community college student, 2-year student, degree completion, persistence, momentum, and barriers), resulting in the location of 2,200 studies published since 1985. Reference lists of relevant books, articles, and reports from this literature, as well as conference proceedings and dissertation abstracts, were consulted. To include relevant nonacademic work, the Google search engine was used, and publication listings of major nonprofit organizations funding or conducting research on community colleges (e.g., MDRC, Jobs for the Future, RAND, the Lumina Foundation) were examined. The author also corresponded with researchers at the Community College Research Center in New York to inquire as to unpublished research, and several reviewed the list of studies to be included and suggested additions.

After the more than 3,000 studies produced by that search were culled to identify those which dealt with independent data sets, the resulting list of approximately 750 studies were filtered according to two criteria: (1) They used quantitative or qualitative methods that could rigorously address the research questions, and (2) quantitative studies needed to produce findings that could reasonably be generalized beyond the sample to the larger population of community college students. Rigorous research was defined as using sufficient and appropriate data to address the research question and following a research design that made it possible to answer the questions posed. For example, for studies addressing questions of "what works" or program effectiveness, the research had to be designed appropriately to satisfactorily rule out competing explanations, providing grounds for causal inference. For studies examining mechanisms or pathways promoting college success (e.g., interviewing studies), the approach to sampling and data collection had to be transparent and defensible. Studies meeting those criteria were included in the final review (n = 300; some are not reflected in the reference list because of space constraints).

Analytic Approach

For the purposes of analysis, studies were grouped into those focusing on (a) the macro-level opportunity structure; (b) institutional practices; and (c) the social, economic, and academic attributes students bring to college. Particular attention was paid to studies that discuss the relationships and interactions between individuals and institutions, institutions and policy settings, or some combination of the three.

A multilevel conceptual model was used for several reasons. First, this approach draws attention to the structural constraints governing individual decision-making. Absent sufficient consideration of structure, many studies (and policies) target individuals' choices as if they are unconstrained. As Hearn (2006) notes, it is not uncommon for models of student success to neglect key relationships between societal structure and stratification processes, state and federal politics, policy implementation, and student outcomes. This review begins to remedy that problem. Second, this approach emphasizes the breadth of ways policy makers could address the same outcome, opening up possibilities for creative solutions. Third, this frame builds on that of several other contemporary researchers, including those involved in the National Postsecondary Education Cooperative's initiative on college student success (e.g., Hearn, 2006; Kuh, Kinzie, Buckley, Bridges, & Hayek, 2006; Perna, 2006; Perna & Thomas, 2006, forthcoming). At the same time, it extends that work by focusing on factors affecting community college success in particular.

The Opportunity Structure Affecting Community College Success

An opportunity structure denotes those exogenous factors either limiting or facilitating the work of community colleges and the success of their students. Its existence may reflect our societal need for status hierarchies, playing an important role in preserving our culture (Yankelovich, 1991). Through political and financial decisions, politics, and practices, we maintain a social order that constrains the educational opportunities of some and promote those of others.

The community college itself is sometimes cast as an actor in a differentiated opportunity structure that legitimates inequality (Brint and Karabel, 1989). One of the most robust streams of literature centers on the question of whether community colleges provide a democratizing or diversionary influence on students. Over the last three decades, dozens of empirical studies conducted by sociologists and economists have generally concluded (with a few exceptions) that the positive, "democratizing" effect of community college slightly outweighs the negative, "diversionary" influence of drawing students away from baccalaureate-granting colleges (e.g., Alba & Lavin, 1981; Alfonso, 2006; Anderson, 1981; Breneman & Nelson, 1981; Doyle, 2008; Dougherty, 1987; Hilmer, 1997, 2000; Leigh & Gill, 2003; Long & Kurlaender, 2008; Melguizo, 2009; Reynolds, 2006; Reynolds & DesJardins, 2009; Rouse 1995, 1998; Stephan, Rosenbaum, & Person, 2009; Velez, 1985). These effects are the result of how the institutional actor (the community college) functions while structurally subordinated to multiple entities—government, business, and 4-year colleges. Its actions are constrained by each of these forces (Kyvik, 2008).

At the same time, the role of snobbery in perpetuating community college outcomes is often neglected. Since the founding of the public 2-year sector, many have cast this sector as lesser than its counterparts. For example, although during the early decades of the formation of community colleges, the media primarily reported positively on their speedy growth (DeGenaro, 2006), others had already begun to lament their existence. Writing in Educational Record in 1968, W. B. Devall described community colleges as places that enforce "continued dependency, unrealistic aspirations, and wasted ‘general education' " (p. 169). This critique continued in the work of many researchers, particularly those studying the colleges from the outside in (Oromaner, 1984). Today, less than 2% of all national media coverage of education is devoted to community colleges (West, Whitehurst, & Dionne, 2009). Although these public perceptions, including the "rhetoric of inevitability" of poor outcomes, may be changing, the role that they play in informing and structuring decisions about the capacity of this educational sector should not be overlooked (DeGenaro, 2006).

Power, Governance, and Funding

The work of community colleges is intimately connected to their position as publicly funded institutions whose origins, although widely disparate, stem primarily from the actions of local and state actors (Dougherty, 1994). In some states they developed from the desires of citizens for a nearby postsecondary institution, in other cases grew out of normal (teachers) colleges, and in still other cases were crafted by state legislatures. In all cases, they are distinctly public institutions, beholden to multiple constituents, including legislators, the business community, and families. They are often cast as a middle-ground between K-12 education and higher education. Yet as Medsker wrote in 1956, community colleges "do not conform to the established patterns of either the institutions above them or those below them" (p. 248). In fact, when movement has been in the direction away from this tight community connection (as in the movement to globalize the community college) resistance has been substantial, with critics noting that community colleges best serve the public interest by addressing problems unique to their very local environments (Hanson, 2008).

The governance and funding structures of community colleges are tightly linked, with the latter said to reflect the approaches and values of the former (Mullin & Honeyman, 2008). At the same time, the substantial heterogeneity in how community colleges are governed also means that numerous approaches are used for financing community colleges. Since the mid-20th century, community colleges have relied on states and localities for the lion's share (nearly 60% nationally) of their revenues. In total, federal funds (including financial aid) amount to only 15% of community college revenue (Breneman and Nelson, 1981; National Center for Education Statistics, 2007). Additional support from state and local sources fails to compensate for community colleges' relative lack of federal support. Community colleges typically receive between $6,500 and $6,800 per full-time equivalent student annually from state and local sources (Goldrick-Rab, Harris, & Trostel, 2009).

Dependence on state and local funds makes colleges particularly susceptible to fluctuations in the economy and, thus, state and local budgets (Dowd & Cheslock, 2006; Katsinas & Tollefson 2009). This dependence also makes colleges accountable to local taxpayers and business leaders. It can drive decisions about the distribution of time and resources, such as how much effort to invest in more lucrative programming including contract training. Many community colleges are following increasingly entrepreneurial paths, in turn diminishing the power of state governing structures (Mullin & Honeyman, 2008). That entrepreneurialism contributes to struggles to achieve student-focused goals while also bringing in necessary revenue.

Although it is difficult to establish a clear causal relationship between institutional expenditures and degree outcomes, some analyses indicate a positive relationship between the availability of resources per student and college degree attainment (Bound, Lovenheim, & Turner, 2009). When an increase in enrollment creates a crowding of students vying for scarce college resources, rates of degree completion tend to decline (Bound & Turner, 2007; Kurlaender, Grodsky, & Howell, 2009). This is precisely the situation faced by community colleges, which have seen increases in student demand unmatched by increases in public subsidies (Mellow & Heelan, 2008).

Research by Titus (2009) links several aspects of states' higher education finance policies to their bachelor's degree productivity. Although not specifically focused on predicting student-level outcomes at community colleges, his research does indicate the importance of these structural factors. For example, even after accounting for the endogeneity of such factors, Titus finds that the level of state appropriations for higher education and the level of spending on need-based financial aid are positively related to BA production within states. At the same time, he finds that in contrast to other research (e.g., Kienzl, Alfonso, & Melguizo, 2007), labor market conditions (e.g., the unemployment rate) are not predictive of BA production after other factors are accounted for.

It is also possible that the overall low average rates of spending on community college students may contribute to the weakness of observable relationships between spending and outcomes—because funding even at the highest level is inadequate. For example, consider remedial education, which has notoriously low rates of success. As described later in this review, the best remedial education is said to be developmental, not only equipping students to learn content but also teaching them how to succeed in college—yet few remedial courses are of this quality. A cost evaluation of a high-quality remedial program in Massachusetts, designed by a team of specialists, revealed that the costs of a high-quality remedial program greatly exceed costs of typical remedial instruction (Dowd & Ventimiglia, 2008). This evidence suggests that the quality of the typical remediation problems is relatively low and may be related to inadequate funding— and that more extensive and expensive, high-quality programs could have a positive impact.

Goals and Incentives

The actions of community colleges and their students are also framed by an emphasis on college-going rather than college completion. Since the mid-20th century, governments and philanthropies have played an active role in promoting access to higher education but until recently most paid far less attention to whether students finish college. This emphasis is reflected in how community colleges are funded. Funding formulas tend to be based on enrollment. This approach rewards colleges for getting students in the door but not for making sure those students succeed. In theory, students would seek out colleges and programs where other students have had success in finishing degrees, transferring to 4-year colleges, and getting jobs—and those same colleges and programs would compete against one another to attract students. But in practice, students lack information about college performance, and competition is limited because most campuses serve a primarily local population (rather than a statewide or national population as in the case of 4-year colleges and universities). The method by which most community colleges are funded thus provides little incentive for institutions to focus on improving the quality of outcomes for their students. For example, among the mix of federal funds and programs dedicated to the community college sector, very few aim to improve institutional performance (Goldrick-Rab, Harris, & Trostel, 2009).

Financial Aid

Student financial aid is the single largest investment governments make in community colleges. Yet many of the rules and guidelines governing the distribution of aid make it difficult for community college students to access and keep their financial aid. For example, although part-time enrollment may reflect a student's need to earn money to afford college (and many community college students enroll part-time), it simultaneously reduces aid eligibility. Students enrolled less than half time are ineligible for any form of aid, and earnings from work are absorbed quickly (especially for independent students) under the federal formula (Goldrick-Rab & Roksa, 2008; Lapovsky, 2008). In one study of low-income workers in six different community colleges, participants reported concerns about the forgone wages associated with reduced work when going to school, being rendered ineligible for financial aid because of having a working spouse, and not knowing enough about their financial aid opportunities or even the existence of financial aid (Matus-Grossman, Gooden, Wavelet, Diaz, & Seupersad, 2002).

Does a lack of financial aid affect momentum toward a degree? Clearly, students who receive financial aid may have characteristics that reduce the likelihood they will complete college (and vice versa); thus, comparing the persistence of recipients with nonrecipients will yield unsatisfactory results (Goldrick-Rab, Harris, & Trostel, 2009; Hossler et al. 2009). Quantitative analyses that have attempted to isolate effects of financial aid on persistence using nationally representative data sets have produced mixed findings, partly because of differences in statistical techniques, sample, and the time frame under study (Dowd & Coury, 2006; Hossler et al. 2009). Recent rigorous analyses of the effects of aid on persistence reveal that students who receive financial aid appear more likely to make consistent progress in college. For example, receiving a Pell Grant appears to decrease the probability of withdrawal among students during their first 2 years of college (Bettinger, 2004). Conversely, Dowd and Coury (2006) found that loans had no effect on degree completion when they are taken out by community college students in the first year and had negative effects on persistence. Furthermore, grants and work study had no significant effects. But aid may represent more to students than money. A study by DesJardins, Ahlburg, and McCall (2002) indicates that both the type of aid and the timing of aid may affect student retention; for example, scholarships given earlier during college appear to be more effective at preventing stopout. Overall, reviews of the effects of traditional need-based grants indicate that they hold promise for promoting persistence among community college students (Mundel, 2008).

Institutional Differentiation

The requirement that community college students move institutions in order to complete a bachelor's degree introduces another potential structural barrier to student success. Although institutional differentiation arguably expands opportunities by increasing the number of slots available in postsecondary education, it may also restrict opportunities if transfer across schools is difficult (Shavit, Arum, & Gamoran, 2007). This is the case in the United States, where the system does not facilitate the equitable flow of all students among all schools. Some students who change schools lose a portion of the credits they earned at the last institution they attended, fail to piece together a coherent curriculum of courses, and struggle to find the means with which to pay for college and travel to school (Bailey, 2003; McCormick, 2003; Prager, 2001).

Studies that compare the outcomes of students who successfully transfer from community to 4-year colleges with students who begin at 4-year colleges and rise to junior year status provide some of the strongest evidence that institutional differentiation (put another way, the need to transfer) is itself a prime barrier to degree completion. One particularly rigorous analysis (which includes corrections for differences in how students initially select into college) finds that the type of first college attended does not contribute to disparities in bachelor's degree completion rates among low students of low socioeconomic statues—after the initial transfer is accounted for (Melguizo & Dowd, 2009). The findings support the idea that reducing structural barriers between the 2- and 4-year sectors may cause completion rates among community college entrants to rise.

A related issue is the ability of policy makers to track the progress of students across colleges and universities in order to examine progress and assess program and policy effectiveness. Student-unit record data allow for individual outcomes to be tracked across institutions and for educational employment outcomes to be linked. Most states do not have the requisite data systems to link K-12 and postsecondary education or to link across sectors within postsecondary education. This severely limits the potential for states to refocus community college on outcomes, measure the cost-effectiveness of institutional practices, or identify key areas for reform (Data Quality Campaign, 2008; L'Orange & Ewell, 2006).

Interactions between Social and Educational Policymaking

Community college student success is affected not only by policies that are explicitly intended to influence educational outcomes in particular but also by social policies. For example, for much of the latter half of the 20th century, one route to college access for women in poverty with children was through the welfare system. Under the federal program Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), some welfare recipients received free tuition and child care so that they might attend college. Following the passage of the 1996 Personal Responsibility Work Opportunity and Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), which put recipients directly into work, there were significant declines in the number of poor women allowed access to college via this route (Shaw, Goldrick-Rab, Mazzeo, & Jacobs, 2006). Poor women (and poor men) were also affected by the 1998 Workforce Investment Act (WIA), a workforce development policy that sharply curbed access to job training. Whereas under the Job Training and Partnership Act, community colleges across the country enrolled thousands of low-income adults in both long-term and short-term training programs, those numbers dropped dramatically under WIA. Moreover, the federal welfare reform and WIA worked in tandem to reduce the incentives for community colleges to develop and provide programs for the truly poor, via the development of an accountability regime that increased paperwork and decreased funding. Thus, today it is harder than ever for the poorest adults to find ways to afford attendance at community college, and to find support if they do enroll.

Institutional Practices Affecting Community College Success

Most interventions intended to generate reform and improvement are targeted at colleges and universities. This section considers research evidence as to the relationship between different kinds of institutional practices and student outcomes.

Access to Credit-Bearing Coursework

A lack of academic preparation does not preclude community college enrollment, but it does affect the transition to college credit-bearing coursework. The practice of separating noncredit basic skills instruction from the provision of academic college coursework is common and affects large numbers of students (Jacobs & Tolbert-Bynum, 2008; Van Noy, Jacobs, Korey, Bailey, & Hughes, 2008). Many are older adults from disadvantaged backgrounds, who often enter higher education with low levels of literacy. Nationally, 57% of 2-year institutions rank the academic preparation of their entering students as fair or poor (El-Khawas & Knopp, 1996; Lewis, Farris, & Greene, 1996). For students who did not complete a high school diploma, some period of enrollment in Adult Basic Education (ABE) coursework is necessary prior to enrollment in the most fundamental college-entry courses.

There has been a shift in recent decades toward providing ABE in community colleges rather than the K-12 sector (Duke & Strawn, 2008; Jacobs & Tolbert-Bynum, 2008; Morest, 2004). Most empirical studies find that ABE programs are of low quality and have little economic or educational impact in terms of helping students move on to college-level work (D'Amico, 1997; Pauly & DiMeo, 1996). For example, in a study of students in Washington State's community and technical colleges, Prince and Jenkins (2005) found that only 13% of adults who started in ESL programs earned any college credits during the next 5 years, and only 30% of students in ABE and GED programs transitioned to college-credit courses during that time. Other studies show that half of all ABE students drop out in less than 10 weeks, and only a small proportion of GED students who earn that credential then go on to college-level coursework (Alamprese, 2005; Jobs for the Future, 2004). As a result, ABE classrooms often experience "attendance turbulence," impelling some administrators to use an open-entry/open-exit system via which adult learners can come and go (Sticht, MacDonald, Erickson, 1998; Strucker 2006). It is unsurprising that an analysis of the results of 22 of the most credible outcome studies in adult education found that only 5 identified earnings gains and 4 identified student test scores gains (Beder, 1999).

Although research suggests that economic and personal factors mediate the relationship between basic education and adult outcomes (D'Amico, 1999), there is also evidence that institutional practices matter for the quality of ABE. In particular, links between ABE and further educational opportunities and to employers are also vital aspects of program quality; traditionally, adult basic education programs have weak or nonexistent links with advanced certificate and degree programs (Alamprese, 2005; Jacobs & Tolbert-Bynum, 2008). As Jacobs and Tolbert-Bynum put it, "Currently, the lack of a relationship between ABE and degree-granting activities means that ABE is often insufficiently interesting to students to serve as an enticement for continuing enrollment in college … even students who are interested in pursuing a college degree do not know how to do so" (2008, p. 5).

These issues also affect high school graduates in need of additional skills development. Given that students bound for community colleges are less likely to take and succeed in rigorous courses while in secondary school, it is predictable that for more than two-fifths of entering community college students the first year is characterized by participation in remedial education (National Center for Education Statistics, 2003). Most community college students (90%) spend a year or less in remediation, and they are most often engaged in remedial math courses rather than writing or reading. Students who require remedial coursework appear less likely to complete any type of credential at a community college (Bailey, Calcagno, Jenkins, Leinbach, & Kienzl, 2005).

The debates surrounding remedial education are extensive and include whether remedial coursework should be integrated with credit-bearing coursework to increase its quality and effectiveness and, relatedly, where (e.g., at a 2-year vs. a 4-year college) it should be offered (Shaw, 1997; Zeitlin & Markus, 1996). Another question often asked is whether high rates of remediation stem from institutional disjunctures between K-12 and postsecondary education, such as a misalignment of coursework and expectations. At the heart of these debates is a critical question: whether low rates of college completion among remedial students means that remediation has deleterious effects on student progress (Bailey, 2009). It is not an easy question to answer, because students who take remedial coursework differ in both observable and unobservable ways from students who do not. Analysts must therefore take care to distinguish the process of selection into remediation from any effects of remediation on later outcomes.

Some recent rigorous studies of remedial education in community colleges have found short-term positive effects on student persistence (Attewell, Lavin, Domina, & Levey, 2006; Bettinger & Long, 2005; Calcagno & Long, 2008; Jepsen 2006; Moss & Yeaton, 2006), whereas other rigorous studies find no impacts on degree completion (Calcagno & Long, 2008; Martorell & McFarlin 2007). This means that even though students in remediation are less likely to complete college degrees, that may not be attributable to remedial education itself. The impact also appears to vary by the type of remedial coursework taken, although the findings are inconsistent in this regard. In one study the effects were notably larger for remedial coursework in reading and writing when compared with the effects of math coursework (Attewell et al., 2006), but other studies have found positive effects of math remediation, whereas the results for English remediation suggested no conclusive positive or negative impact on students (Bettinger & Long, 2005; Kolajo, 2004).

Some of the strongest evidence that institutional practices regarding academic coursework affect student success comes from two studies indicating that certain courses act as "gatekeepers" to college completion (Calcagno et al., 2006; Roksa, Jenkins, Jaggars, Zeidenberg, & Cho, 2009). Passing gatekeeper math and writing courses enables access to higher level coursework, significantly contributing to student progress. That relationship appears to hold even after accounting for differences in students taking and not taking gatekeeper courses. For example, a study in Florida found that among comparable students in remedial writing courses, those who passed the first-year composition course were more than twice as likely to graduate when compared with those who did not pass that course (Calcagno et al., 2006). A study of Virginia community college students showed that gatekeeper courses appear to offer similar benefits in that state (Roksa et al., 2009). And yet many students fail to take any gatekeeper courses at all. The low rates of gatekeeper course enrollment among academically well-prepared Virginia community college students in particular suggest that institutional factors are likely contributing to this problem (Jenkins, Jaggars, & Roksa, 2009).

Pedagogical Practices

The content and quality of instruction in the community college sector is widely debated (Perin, 2001). Part of the challenge stems from heterogeneity among students. In addition, there is general consensus that instruction for adults needs to integrate curricular content with practical applications, particularly in entry-level courses (Badway & Grubb, 1997; Perin, 2001). However, such "contextualized" teaching and learning strategies are relatively uncommon. For example, Pauly and DiMeo (1996) found that only 16% of the adult basic education programs that they studied made any effort to link basic education and the world of work. In a 1994 survey of 75 remediation and basic skills providers, only 2 providers reported that they linked curriculum with vocational skills training (Grubb & Kalman, 1994). Instead, texts and content were separated from context in what Grubb calls the "skills and drills" approach (1996, p. 72). Similarly, a study of 271 adult literacy programs revealed that 203 used instructional strategies and materials that were devoid of strong connections to the life-context and real-world situations learners faced, including the workplace (Purcell-Gates, Degener, & Jacobsen, 1998).

Although research has linked levels of instruction spending to community college outcomes, community colleges often lack the resources to support innovative practices or to fund the developmental costs for new and innovative teaching approaches (Bailey, Jenkins, & Leinbach, T., 2005). There are some competitive grant programs that support innovation in higher education, such as the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE), but these grants have historically been small in size and scope and rarely used strategically (Goldrick-Rab, Harris, & Trostel, 2009).

A related issue is the need for technological improvements to classrooms that must accompany innovative teaching practices. A recent survey of community college leaders revealed that all four of the most pressing facilities needs are instruction-related—those related to lab space, general classroom space, computer lab space, and office space (Katsinas & Tollefson, 2009).

Faculty

Although there is a robust literature on the effects of teachers on student outcomes in the K-12 arena, among studies of community college student success the role of faculty is often neglected (for notable exceptions see Grubb, 1999; Outcalt, 2000). This seems a remarkable omission, especially given that some of the conditions under which these faculty members work, including a reliance on adjunct faculty, a lack of professional development opportunities, and shortages in key fields, have been linked (at least via correlational studies) with student outcomes (Calcagno, Bailey, Jenkins, Kienzl, & Leinbach, 2008; Brock et al., 2007).

Given limited resources available for instructional costs, it is no surprise that community colleges rely very heavily on part-time adjunct lecturers who often teach multiple courses at multiple colleges and receive low wages and no benefits (Bailey, Jenkins, & Leinbach, 2005). Some analyses identify positive effects of adjuncts on specific types of course-taking, whereas others find an overall negative effect on student persistence (for a summary, see Bettinger & Long, 2006).

Compared with professors at 4-year institutions, whose salaries include pay for time spent on activities other than teaching, community college professors have little incentive to invest in their own professional development or spend their scarce time learning how to effectively use new technology. Like professors elsewhere, community college faculty need resources for planning and curriculum development and for regular meetings to discuss teaching, refine lessons, and assess performance. Unfortunately, at many community colleges the most common forms of professional development are the kinds of one-time workshops that research shows are ineffective. Again, this problem stems in part from a lack of resources for faculty development: In many states funds for college faculty development are limited or have declined in recent years (Chancellor's Office of the California Community Colleges, 2009).

Another issue topping the list of concerns among community college administrators is a severe shortage of faculty in nursing, allied health, and Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (Hardy, Katsinas, & Bush, 2007). Teachers in these fields are in high demand, making it more difficult to attract and retain these teachers. They have numerous other job opportunities, most of which pay higher wages and offer better benefits. Shortages in such specialized fields are not new, but compounding the problem for community colleges is that two thirds of their faculty members are between the ages of 45 and 64 (Snyder, Dillow, & Hoffman, 2008) so although hiring younger and, more importantly, less expensive faculty may be an attractive option, the pool of qualified applicants with these specific in-demand skills may be quite small.

Informational Requirements

By virtue of their extensive course catalogues and numerous services, coupled with the diverse array of students they serve, community colleges provide ample opportunities but—according to some—insufficient information with which to guide students through choosing among opportunities. As a result of substantial informational requirements accompanied by too little advising, some students may take courses they do not need, spend a longer period of time in coursework that financial aid will not fund, and eventually drop out (Grubb, 2006; Rosenbaum et al., 2006).

For example, many community college students have little knowledge about course requirements and in some cases are not even aware that the classes they are taking are remedial and do not count toward a degree (Person, Rosenbaum, & Deil-Amen, 2006). This makes academic advising important to students' chances of success; one study finds that this is especially true for students with academic deficiencies (Bahr, 2008). When community colleges do not explicitly provide the information and social skills their students need, students face obstacles in finishing college and moving into the labor force (Deil-Amen, 2006).

Organizational Learning

A final issue regarding institutional practices has to do with how community college administrators make decisions. In particular, there is a growing movement to encourage educators to use data to identify opportunities for improved institutional performance and enhanced student outcomes. Despite widespread interest in using data to drive decision making, researchers have identified obstacles to integrating findings from institutional research into daily practice. For example, many community colleges lack sufficient numbers of trained researchers to conduct analyses and expertly clean student-level data and organize it for research purposes (Morest & Jenkins, 2007). There is also some debate over whether data should be leveraged as part of a "culture of evidence" in which data drives decisions or a "culture of inquiry" in which practitioners take center stage (Bailey & Alfonso, 2005; Dowd, 2005). On a theoretical level, at least, helping institutional leaders view evidence of student outcomes and discuss those outcomes should facilitate improvements (Bensimon, 2004; Jenkins, 2007; Jenkins & Kerrigan, 2009; Zachry & Orr, 2009). At the same time, although establishing a culture of evidence may be a necessary condition to improving student success, it is unlikely to be sufficient, because adoption of new practices by administrators does not always follow (Jenkins & Kerrigan, 2009).

Social Inequalities Affecting Community College Success

When considering the root causes of low rates of completion among community college students, many analysts begin with a discussion of student characteristics. The primary point of these efforts is to describe the substantial barriers community college students face and therefore the challenges that institutions must overcome to help students succeed in earning degrees. This emphasis is often echoed by community college practitioners who argue that insufficient attention to the wide variation in students' preparation and educational expectations leads to misleading assessment of success and unfairly results in too much attention paid to factors outside of colleges' control (Bailey, Jenkins, & Leinbach, 2005). Therefore, in this next section I examine research on how student attributes affect the likelihood of success in the community college sector.

Social Inequalities and Student Characteristics

Relative to other undergraduates, students attending the nation's 2-year public colleges come from a wider range of family backgrounds. For example, 40% of undergraduates enrolled at community colleges in 2008 were non-White, 38% came from families where neither parent was educated beyond high school, and 56% were women (in comparison, the corresponding figures for students at public 4-year institutions are 33%, 25%, and 53%).

The social and economic characteristics of community college students are often termed demographic (implying that they are hereditary) rather than ascriptive (meaning that they reflect positions in a stratification system). Correspondingly, the greater racial, socioeconomic, and gender diversity among community college goers is often treated as an explanation for institutional outcomes. But the compositional diversity of community colleges itself reflects social inequalities, which could be taken into account when we attempt to move beyond simple explanations to identify root causes. In other words, although the observation that students' characteristics are correlated with college outcomes is important, it does not tell us the mechanisms through which those relationships operate—or what we can do about it. For example, we can move beyond stating that community colleges serve more students from low socioeconomic backgrounds who are less likely to complete college and instead discuss the underlying reasons why such a relationship exists. Doing so increases the potential for acting on those underlying inequalities.

Academic Challenges

One of the most widely accepted lessons from research on college success is that all students, regardless of what type of college they plan to attend, need to be academically prepared. For example, Adelman (1999, 2006) identified a "toolbox" of high school courses considered crucial for preparing a student for postsecondary participation, including those in math, science, and foreign language. Students whose high school curricula include advanced levels of these courses tend to perform better in college, even after high school grades and standardized test scores are held constant. Similarly, Roderick, Nagaoka, Coca, and Moeller (2008, 2009) point toward a set of skills required for college readiness that includes academic content knowledge and basic skills as well as core academic skills. Measures of performance on these skills (e.g., via coursework, achievement test scores, and grades) indicate their importance in predicting college outcomes and their lack of integration into the work of many high schools.

There is widespread acknowledgement that students enjoy differential access to academic preparation for college: Economically disadvantaged and minority high school students are more likely to receive secondary schooling in vocational rather than academic tracks; take fewer math and science courses; and attend schools with fewer resources, less-qualified teachers, and a lack of college prep coursework (Cabrera, Burkum, & La Nasa, 2005; Gamoran, Porter, Smithson, & White, 1997; Nora & Rendon, 1990; Orfield, 1992; Roderick, Nagaoka, Coca, & Moeller, 2008, 2009; Terenzini, Cabrera, & Bernal, 2001). This is especially problematic given empirical evidence that the benefits of strong high school preparation are greater for socioeconomically disadvantaged students (Cabrera et al., 2005). Moreover, many community college–bound students are unaware of the need to engage in rigorous college prep coursework, partly because of the false perception that open-door institutions have no academic requirements (Schneider & Stevenson, 1999; Person et al., 2006; Rosenbaum et al., 2006). Indeed, some studies indicate a broad lack of awareness of placement testing and its consequences (Deil-Amen & Rosenbaum, 2002; Person et al., 2006). The concentration of poor and minority students in schools with other poor and/or minority students exacerbates the uneven distribution of both academic opportunities and "college knowledge," because students with greater needs are isolated from more advantaged students (Roderick, Nagaoka, & Coca, 2009).

Economic Challenges

Students also face significant challenges in figuring out how to pay for college (Hossler & Vesper, 1993; Roderick, Nagaoka, Coca, & Moeller, 2008, 2009; St. John, 1991). Affordability is an important reason why a disproportionate number of low-income and minority students do not attend college or do not complete a college degree once enrolled (Mumper, 1993; Perna, 2002). Trends in financial aid toward providing less need-based aid (and more merit-based aid) and devoting more funding to loans rather than grants have reduced the chances that college students from low-income families will enter college or complete a degree (Goldrick-Rab, Harris, & Trostel, 2009; Orfield, 1992; Perna, 1998, 2002; St. John, 1990).

Knowledge of how to pay for college is concentrated in families where at least one parent attended higher education. First-generation students are less likely to receive high-quality information about financial aid opportunities and, in turn, are less likely to apply to college or file the federal application for student aid, which is required for them to receive grants or loans (DesJardins, Ahlburg, & McCall, 2006; Roderick, Nagaoka, Coca, & Moeller, 2008, 2009). Both the quantity and quality of college financing information that families receive differ by social class: Economically advantaged students learn about college and how to pay for it from a variety of sources, whereas poor students often have to rely on their high school counselors, largely because most persons in their circle of influence (e.g., family members, close friends) did not attend college (Cabrera et al., 2005; McDonough, 1997; Roderick, Nagaoka, Coca, & Moeller, 2008, 2009). As a result, disadvantaged parents are less likely to feel they can predict the cost of college, although they do not necessarily make more errors in their cost estimates when they do provide them (Avery & Kane, 2004; Grodsky & Jones 2007). When they do occur, inaccuracies in cost estimates may discourage some students from any form of college attendance (Avery & Kane, 2004).

Social and Informational Hurdles

Almost regardless of family background, the educational expectations of today's traditional-aged students are uniformly high. But expectations do not always translate into the development of a concrete and realistic plan or commitment to a future course of behavior (Morgan, 2005; Roderick, Nagaoka, Coca, & Moeller, 2009). Students from socioeconomically disadvantaged family backgrounds are less likely to possess a clear sense of how to negotiate either the college social or academic context. As a result, when these students are confronted with multiple pathways and options (with regard to courses, programs of study, etc), they are more likely to make ineffective choices (Alfonso, 2004; Person et al., 2006; Roderick, Nagaoka, Coca, & Moeller, 2008, 2009). And there is evidence that educational choices matter. In a country where parents with greater resources tend to live in school districts with more educational opportunities, it is difficult to disentangle students' educational experiences in primary and secondary school from early familial experiences. However, comparisons among students from similar family backgrounds but with different types of high school education reveal that the quality of academic coursework and performance in that coursework are particularly strong predictors of both college entry and subsequent performance (Nora & Rendon, 1990; St. John, 1991).

Whether a student has a college-educated parent influences the kind of information about college that she accumulates in the years leading up to choosing a college (Person et al., 2006). For example, the process of college selection for Latino students (who disproportionately do not have college-educated parents) has been described as a "chain of enrollment," where friends and family members provide each other with information and support and ultimately follow one another into specific institutions (Person & Rosenbaum, 2006; Person et al., 2006; Rosenbaum et al., 2006). The jobs held by a student's parents may also create advantages or disadvantages by, for example, opening doors to easier admissions or by introducing insecurity (when the labor market cannot sustain availability of opportunities).

Attendance Patterns

Many facets of students' attendance patterns have been linked to chances for college success. For example, research indicates a strong association between an undisrupted transition to college and the likelihood of degree completion, such that individuals who make a timely transition into college without a significant period of delay after high school are substantially more likely to complete a credential or degree during college (Adelman, 2006; Bozick & DeLuca, 2005; Goldrick-Rab & Han, 2010; Rowan-Kenyon, 2007). Yet 17% of high school graduates who begin college at a community college delay that initial enrollment for 8 months or more (Adelman, 2005). The ability to make a seamless transition into community college depends not only on academic performance in high school but also on family background, sociodemographic characteristics, and educational expectations (Goldrick-Rab & Han, 2010).

Despite empirical evidence indicating that continuous, full-time enrollment is the optimal scenario for degree completion, many community college students find that route impossible to follow. Nearly one fourth of them stop out from college within 9 months of initial enrollment. Only 31% of community college students enroll exclusively full time; indeed, 26% enroll less than half time. Part-time enrollment may result from competing demands with work or family or from an inability to afford full-time enrollment. One fifth of community college students are married parents, 15% are single parents, and 10% are married without children (Horn & Nevill, 2006).

Although the most recognized form of student mobility is the upward transfer from a 2-year to a 4-year school, researchers have identified more than a dozen different types of multi-institutional attendance (Adelman, 2004; McCormick, 2003). Analyses of national transcript data reveal that students from the lowest socioeconomic bracket are disproportionately likely to engage in mobility patterns involving discontinuities in enrollment and "reverse" movement from 4-year to 2-year schools—aspects of mobility associated with much lower odds of completion (Goldrick-Rab & Pfeffer, 2009).

Success in postsecondary education is also affected by the age at which a student enters college. What some call a growing "disorderliness" in the traditional sequence of life events has resulted in delayed college entry for some and incomplete progress and later re-entry for others (Jacobs & King, 2002; Rindfuss, Swicegood, & Rosenfeld, 1987). Fifty-three percent of community college students are over age 23, and 35% are age 30 or older (Horn & Nevill, 2006). Women are more likely than men to enroll in community college later in life, and, according to one study, more than four fifths of women entering college after age 25 are actually reenrolling (Jacobs & King, 2002). Older students are disproportionately likely to juggle enrollment with work and family and thus more likely to enroll part time and also to experience life events such as marriage, childbirth, or divorce, which compete with schooling. In an analysis of the college completion rates of women over the age of 25, Jacobs and King (2002) found that these factors (particularly part-time enrollment)—rather than a student's entering age—accounted for the observed lower rates of completion among older students.

Discussion and Conclusions

Researchers and policy makers agree that improving rates of success among community college students is a top educational priority. Given all of the challenges community colleges face, what policies and practices represent the most promising areas for reform? Table 1 highlights 14 of the most popular and/or well-evaluated efforts. They all have received substantial financial or political support from state and local governments as well as philanthropies. They include approaches related to changing the opportunity structure (affecting federal and state funding mechanisms, financial aid processes, and institutional differentiation), institutional practices (changing pedagogical and organizational approaches), and incentives to change student behavior (particularly with regard to academic preparation and affordability). One area that is popularly discussed but not addressed here (because of the dearth of research in the public 2-year sector) is the potential for online solutions (for more, see U.S. Department of Education, 2009).

Unfortunately much of the best evidence on potential reforms is new—and scarce. Many studies purport to identify a set of best practices but are only able to produce suggestive conclusions that cannot tell policy makers how any one practice could create higher rates of student success (e.g., see Habley & McClanahan, 2004). A much more rigorous research agenda focused on community college students is needed to inform and evaluate future actions.

Future research to identify additional promising practices and policies should continue to take into account each of the levels of influence identified in this review. There is a tendency in studies of community colleges to solely emphasize the constraints colleges face that stem from the many needs of their students. Although student-level factors appear to be more important in predicting student outcomes than institutional or structural factors, the possibility remains that these relationships are constrained by the data available to include in statistical models and how those models are constructed (Bailey, Jenkins, & Leinbach, 2005).

One way to stimulate a shift in reform emphasis is to reorient the measurement of student success to account for structural and institutional constraints. Although it is becoming common, for example, to adjust calculations of institutional graduation rates to reflect the level of financial need of enrolled students (e.g., see Taylor et al., 2009), it remains less common to also adjust those calculations for relative state support or institutional expenditures (such as suggested by Gold, 2006, and Bailey, Jenkins, & Leinbach, 2005). The move to performance-based funding and greater accountability should be accompanied by shifts in measurement and calculations of success.

It is particularly important that we identify creative ways to test the effects of new financial investments in community colleges and assess their intended and unintended consequences. The relationship between monetary investments (spending) and student outcomes is far from conclusive, and community colleges—like all public institutions in higher education—face significant budget constraints. State support, although rebounding slightly in the past year, has steadily eroded over time, and prospects for the future look bleak (Dembicki, 2008). Any new federal support will likely be distributed unevenly across states and colleges, which in turn are experiencing the recession in different ways. This may provide some enhanced opportunities to assess how colleges with more or less resources produce higher or lower graduation rates.

Among those institutional practices deserving of more careful analysis are learning communities, first-year support service programs, and adult literacy programs. As Comings and Soricone (2006) have noted, most studies of such programs lack longitudinal samples and/or appropriate comparison groups, and, perhaps most troubling, implemented programs often deviate from their intentional intervention designs. Thus, it is difficult to determine whether the programs truly increase academic momentum or whether they simply attract students more likely to make academic progress in the first place, and it is hard to compare the conditions under which programs are more or less successful in order to draw lessons about how to improve program effectiveness. Thus, there is significant demand for more research using experimental or quasi-experimental methods to test specific curricula and support services and to examine effects for subgroups of learners (Comings & Soricone, 2006).

We also need to know much more about how faculty members affect student success in community colleges. Higher education is a labor-intensive industry, and investments in instruction are particularly expensive. Although the reliance on part-time faculty is unlikely to subside in coming years, more evidence is needed on what kinds of professional development and support translate into more effective teaching practices.

Finally, we should expect research on the effectiveness of student-directed incentives to continue. Undergirding many education reforms across the K-16 spectrum appears to be an assumption that students can be motivated to work harder—thereby driving up graduation rates. Pay-for-performance efforts include those that reward grades among elementary school students and continued enrollment among college students. Although these efforts cost money, they might be cost-effective if they generate substantial impacts without requiring the overhaul of major policies or institutional practices.

All efforts to enhance community college student success should be rigorously evaluated with frameworks that are capable of both estimating and explaining impacts. We need to know what works and why. Such an agenda necessitates improvements in data quality, because relatively few national longitudinal surveys include sizeable samples of 2-year college students, and only a handful of state data systems allow researchers to track students into higher education and among 2- and 4-year colleges. Having an incomplete picture of student pathways through college may lead analysts to draw unsupported conclusions. Selection bias is a statistical problem plaguing much of higher education research, because college outcomes can be observed only for those who participate, and participants differ in important and often unobservable ways from nonparticipants. This area of research is dominated both by descriptive rather than explanatory analyses and by multivariate analyses that attempt to make causal arguments without first taking the necessary steps to minimize selection bias. These issues can and should be remedied by current and future generations of researchers.

The best research on community colleges moving forward will be interdisciplinary and use both quantitative and qualitative methods. Far too often researchers, just like policy makers and practitioners, act in silos, failing to consider each others' theories or evidence. As a result, too much time can be devoted to one policy strategy or another, and unintended consequences may occur. The increased attention to the public 2-year sector in policy circles should be matched by increased attention by researchers.

Despite the inherently varied and multifaceted nature of the American community college mission, it is clear that in this economic environment, improving the academic achievement of students attending community college must remain a top priority. Some students enroll at 2-year colleges because they want to, others because they feel they have few other options. That so many fail to make progress, getting stuck often very early in their trajectories, is evidence of both the numerous barriers that these students face and a failure by colleges and states to identify and implement effective reforms. We still know far too little about what works, but what evidence we do have indicates a need for a multifaceted approach that is flexible enough to accommodate the variety of student needs and ambitious enough to create meaningful change. It is possible for policy makers to serve all kinds of students while achieving greater levels of success. Doing so will require the coordination of proven educational practices that work together, and not at cross-purposes, toward the common goal of increasing academic momentum. Colleges and universities should be active participants in (rather than the objects of) such efforts and should be allowed autonomy to achieve these ends while being held accountable for making sure goals are met.

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Thomas Bailey, Douglas N. Harris, Katherine Hughes, Davis Jenkins, Gregory Kienzl, Timothy Leinbach, Christopher Mazzeo, Michael Olneck, and Jospia Roksa for their comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of this paper. University of Wisconsin–Madison graduate students Brian An, Seong Won Han, Eleonora Hicks, Peter Kinsley, Cynthia Taines, and Quentin Wheeler-Bell provided excellent research assistance.

Article Notes

DR. SARA GOLDRICK-RAB is assistant professor of educational policy studies and sociology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She is also the senior scholar at the Wisconsin Center for the Advancement of Postsecondary Education and affiliate of the Institute for Research on Poverty, the La Follette School of Public Affairs, and the Consortium for Chicago School Research. Dr. Goldrick-Rab received the William T. Grant Scholars Award in 2010 for her project "Rethinking College Choice in America." In 2009 she was lead author of a Brookings Institution blueprint titled "Transforming Community Colleges" and in 2006-2007 was a National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation postdoctoral fellow. Dr. Goldrick-Rab co-directs the Wisconsin Scholars Longitudinal Study, an experimental evaluation of the impact of need-based financial aid on college graduation that includes a longitudinal qualitative study of 2-year and 4-year students.

Notes

An earlier version of this manuscript was written for the Community College Research Center as part of the Achieving the Dream: Community Colleges Count initiative. Funding was provided by Lumina Foundation for Education. Small sections also appeared in a paper issued by the Brookings Institution in 2009. © 2010 AERA

CITE: 

Challenges and Opportunities for Improving Community College Student Success

Sara Goldrick-Rab

REVIEW OF EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH September 2010 vol. 80 no. 3 437-469