1

Outlining the Problem

It is important to quantify the racialization of college access and success at the outset because, as Tanya Golash-Boza notes, “race scholars have to start with empirical questions about why things are the way they are and push forward theoretical understandings that help us to explicate and end racial oppression.”¹ The goal is to highlight what have become long-standing normative expectations about the racialized aspects of degree attainment that continue to be perceived from the vantage point of individual rather than institutional failings.

Obtaining a college degree is now the principal route to upward mobility in the United States, and because there continue to be large racial-ethnic disparities in degree attainment, inequality continues to grow.² The benefits are clear and undeniable. In 2016, the median income among full-time workers with a bachelor’s degree was approximately $60,112. It was only $35,984 for high school graduates with no college degree employed full-time.³ Also clear and undeniable is that access to the benefits associated with obtaining a college degree is racialized: 15 percent of Latinx, 23 percent of Black, and 36 percent of White adults have a college degree.⁴

It is not that Latinx and Black youth have not internalized the message that they should go to college—they have. From 1996 to 2012, college enrollment increased by 240 percent among Latinx youth and 72 percent among Black youth, compared to only 12 percent among White youth.⁵ Efforts aimed at expanding access to postsecondary institutions have succeeded in creating college enrollments that are more diverse than ever before. However, most historically underrepresented students continue to leave without a degree. Specifically, about 60 percent of Black and 47 percent of Latinx college students will not obtain their degree, compared to 37 percent of White college students.⁶ This low likelihood of degree attainment means that enrolling in college can be damaging for the futures of too many Black and Latinx youth.

Enrolling but not finishing can be damaging because the expansion in college access has occurred alongside increasing costs and decreasing sources of grant aid. Today, the average student receives less financial support than four decades ago.⁷ In 1975, the average Pell Grant covered approximately 84 percent of published tuition and fees, but by 2017 it covered only 37 percent for four-year public institutions and 11 percent for four-year private, nonprofit institutions.⁸ Essentially, tuition increases have outpaced grant aid, and “aid” increasingly comes in the form of loans. In 1980, approximately 66 percent of all federal financial aid was in the form of grants, and 33 percent was in the form of loans. By 2003 the fractions had flipped, and only 23 percent was in the form of grants, and 68 percent was in the form of loans.

This shift toward loan debt is detrimental to the likelihood that students will persist to graduation. Higher rates of grant aid are associated with increased likelihood of graduation, whereas higher rates of loan aid are associated with the opposite.⁹ Racial-ethnic differences in borrowing are striking. Approximately 43 percent of Black and 30 percent of Latinx students, but only 25 percent of White students have more than $30,500 in student debt after four to six years in college.¹⁰

Expanding access while increasing costs without also attending to increasing the likelihood that students will graduate means that not only is college financially riskier but that increasing numbers of low-income and low-wealth students, who are disproportionately Black and Latinx, are exposed to that risk.¹¹ James Rosenbaum and colleagues were among the first to call attention to the fact that given the reliance of low-income students on loans, broadening college access could further disadvantage those students if attention were not paid to increasing their graduation rates.¹² This warning has not been heeded. Enrollment has increased faster among low-income students than among high-income students, but graduation rates have increased faster among high-income than among low-income students.¹³

Consequently, the downside of the successful push toward “college for all” is that access to a degree becomes access to student debt without also providing the supports necessary to increase the likelihood that historically underrepresented students graduate.¹⁴ Because Black students take on the most debt, they have been hurt the most by a system that has prioritized broadening enrollment over increasing persistence.¹⁵ If we are to continue promoting college as the way to enter or stay in the middle class, we must do a better job of creating differentiated institutional structures that facilitate persistence.

Framework for Identity-Conscious Supports

This book orients colleges and universities toward the broad category of identity-conscious supports and, within this category, campus counterspaces as one identity-affirming support that can facilitate the college success of students from historically marginalized groups. Counterspaces are those “exclusionary” spaces where those of a similar social identity gather to validate and critique their experiences with the larger institution. Identity-conscious supports consider how social group memberships differentiate students’ pre- college and college-going experiences, and then provide supports accordingly. There is increasing evidence that identity-conscious supports can help bridge historically marginalized students’ transition to and success at historically White colleges and universities.¹⁶ Advocates of identity-conscious supports take seriously the research showing that social group membership gaps remain even after accounting for academic preparation and intellectual abilities, and then actively work to identify social identity factors that could differentially privilege subgroups of students.¹⁷

One example of identity-conscious supports is the importance for science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) departments to intentionally highlight scientific discoveries made by minorities as a way of increasing minority student persistence.¹⁸ Intentionality is needed to counterbalance the implicit messages sent by what minority students call the “wall of White men”—hallways lined with photographs and paintings celebrating the university’s great thinkers. Not seeing one’s group represented in the institution’s cultural artifacts and faculty communicates information about the institution’s social hierarchy. This implicit hierarchy intrudes on marginalized students’ ability to align their social identities with their academic identity—how they perceive themselves as students at that institution—by continually reminding them of their outsider status.¹⁹

Throughout this book, identity-affirming counterspaces are discussed in ways that highlight how they help counteract this outsider status—how facilitating formal and informal “exclusionary” spaces enables universities to create the conditions that facilitate historically marginalized students’ inclusion and integration into the broader campus community. Students who experience stereotyping, discrimination, and alienation appear to feel a greater sense of institutional connectedness when they participate in campus counterspaces.²⁰ When administrators actively facilitate counterspaces, these spaces become institutionalized mechanisms that enable marginalized students to support each other in establishing a sense of campus belonging and academic self-confidence.

Inequality at the Starting Gate

The findings reported in this book come from the ongoing Minority College Cohort Study (MCCS), a longitudinal investigation of a cohort of Black and Latinx freshmen who enrolled in college in fall 2013. The MCCS is a sample of 533 academically prepared students: they had an average high school GPA of 3.5, 77 percent had taken at least one advanced placement course, and their average ACT score was in the seventy-fifth percentile of national ACT ranking. This is also a sample of educationally motivated students: 88 percent were certain they would complete their bachelor’s degree, and 63 percent were certain they would go on to complete a graduate or professional degree. Because this sample of students is academically prepared and educationally motivated, I can shift the focus to factors other than academic abilities in examining their transition and adjustment. Even with this shift, however, there is no escaping the substantial racial-ethnic differences in the K–12 educational resources to which students were exposed, resources such as curricular offerings, academic rigor, discursive teaching styles, and instructional technology.²¹ These differences guarantee racial-ethnic gaps in the extent to which students are prepared for both the content of the college curriculum and the instructional style of most faculty.

Once students get to college, these K–12 inequalities are magnified by institutionalized inequalities on campus. As noted by Vijay Pendakur, a director of college diversity programs, “higher education is currently structured in a way that produces significantly lower outcomes for students of color, low-income college students, and first-generation students.”²² One of those structural inequalities is the extent to which students have college-educated family members who can provide supports that increase their likelihood of succeeding in college. These supports include cultural support (advice on norms and expectations of the social and academic culture of the institution), informational support (advice on how to seek out formal and informal resources and opportunities), and instrumental support (advice on study strategies and acquiring content knowledge for specific courses).²³ This means that Black and Latinx students are more dependent on their institutions for “insider knowledge” about how to navigate college successfully.

However, under the current identity-neutral framework used by most postsecondary institutions, generalized issues such as selecting courses, engaging in cocurricular activities, and adjusting to dorm life are delivered with universal programming. Such identity-neutral programming keeps hidden much of the taken-for-granted cultural knowledge of institutions, knowledge that propagates socio-structural inequalities among students precisely because colleges operate according to many unwritten codes of middle- and upper-class cultural norms.²⁴ Consider, for example, an identity-neutral first-year orientation. The orientation would likely not include discussions about the institution’s norms regarding independence versus interdependence. Students in American universities are expected to be individually motivated, to learn independently, and to develop strong independent voices and ideas.²⁵ Students who do not subscribe to this cultural norm are often unknowingly in cultural conflict with what is expected of them.

As Nicole Stephens and colleagues illustrate, these cultural conflicts are often connected to students’ social class backgrounds.²⁶ They show that first- generation students had a high likelihood of being in cultural conflict with the implicit expectations of historically White colleges and universities. First-generation students were less likely to endorse independent motives for attending college, such as exploring their potential and expanding their knowledge of the world, and more likely to endorse interdependent motives, such as helping their family and being a role model for their community. This cultural mismatch was associated with lower grades, even after accounting for SAT scores. They then showed how a manipulation of university orientation materials to represent the university culture as interdependent (about learning and working together with others) eliminated a performance gap between first- and continuing-generation students.

The Inescapable Nature of American Racialization

One can almost matter-of-factly state that class identity matters in the college transition in relation to the argument that one must make for the continued attention to students’ racial-ethnic identities. The arguments foregrounded in this book are in direct opposition to arguments that students should bring only their academic selves to college, leaving behind attachments to their social identities.²⁷ Suspicions of attachments to racial-ethnic and other marginalized identities are based on the White American belief that the ideal identity is a humanist identity that is free of group allegiances.²⁸ The argument is that people who prioritize rational reasoning over subjective preferences are able to “maturely” reason about issues without regard for how it would affect the interests and advancement of members of their gender, race-ethnicity, socioeconomic status, or any other social allegiance.²⁹ Arguments for adopting a humanist identity are motivated by the assumption that Whites have shed their European identities and associated tribal allegiances. This, however, belies the fact that European customs and values permeate all aspects of American society, and therefore makes the humanist identity a colonized identity in which the price of inclusion is erasure through assimilation.

As Linda Alcoff argues, the push for minority individuals to adopt a humanist identity free of attachment to social groups occurs only when identity is mistakenly essentialized and conceptualized as singular—that there is only one way to be a member of a given social group, and that it is stable across historical time and across social contexts. A more informed understanding of social identities is that they are simply points from which to see; “How could there be reason without sight, without a starting place, without some background from which critical questions are intelligible?” she asks.³⁰

In this sense, one’s racial-ethnic identity is not an immature attachment that individuals must attempt to leave behind, but instead an inescapable perspective from which one makes sense of the social world. This inescapability is evident in the Black Lives Matter movement and in the effects of the Trump presidential campaign’s vilification of Latinx and other minority groups. In August 2015, the second year after the students in my study enrolled in college, they were asked about their personal experiences with Black Lives Matter and Donald Trump’s messages. Their responses revealed that media messages and events tied to these issues could only be interpreted through students’ understanding of themselves as racialized beings.

One Black female student expressed these feelings in response to being asked, “Tell me about the most stressful experience you’ve had in relation to the increased tension about race and immigration in the US over the past year.”

In response to the same question, a Latinx female student said,

Even for students who did not have any direct personal experiences with either of these issues, public debates associated with race-ethnicity—their race-ethnicity in particular—maintained a permanent presence, just below the surface, ready to activate their racial-ethnic identity. This hyperawareness was evident in a Black male student’s response to being asked to describe any personal experiences he had had with police or immigration authorities. “I personally haven’t had any bad encounters with the police or anything,” he said. “Of course, I see everything that goes on in the news and stuff… . Just makes you more aware, like you can just think to yourself, it can happen anywhere, you know? … It’s not necessarily you look at yourself as a target, ’cause you Black and young, but it’s not really far from that at the same time. Just, I feel like it’s definitely different for minorities, you know?”

Black Lives Matter and Trump’s presidential campaign are only two of numerous sociohistorical events that make it impossible for Black and Latinx students to bring only their academic selves to college. American society does not allow these students to be anything other than Black college students and Latinx college students. Therefore, thoughtful examination of how their racial-ethnic and associated social identities differentiate their transition to and success in college can only improve the actions universities take to facilitate their persistence.

Safe Spaces versus Counterspaces

When I began this project, “safe spaces” and “counterspaces” were interchangeable terms for places where people with a common social identity came together and collectively provided protection from and resistance to social, political, and institutional oppression. However, by 2015, the concept of a safe space had been completely co-opted and reframed as infantilizing, discriminatory spaces that go against what some have come to redefine as the core mission of institutions of higher learning—exposing students to a combative clash of viewpoints that challenge one’s beliefs. That sentiment was never clearer than in Judith Shulevitz’s New York Times op-ed in March of that year, “In College and Hiding from Scary Ideas.”

Many of those who argue against safe spaces make patriarchal arguments that consider only the prototypical college student whose development is not placed at risk by engaging in a combative exchange of ideas in intellectual discussions that, at times, personally implicate that student’s social identity. This prototypical student is White, male, middle or upper class, and has been validated in educational institutions and in broader societal representations throughout his life. In sharp contrast, many historically marginalized students come to college with a lifetime of negative interactions with those in positions of power in educational spaces. Those experiences are not erased upon entering college, freeing students to engage equally in an “unregulated exchange of ideas,” as Matthew Pratt Guterl put it in his Inside Higher Ed op-ed on August 29, 2016.

Arguments against safe spaces are often based on ahistorical assertions that colleges and universities are post-oppression of all kinds—post-racial, post-gender, post–sexual identity, post–religious affiliation—because, currently, there are few if any laws that directly disadvantage historically marginalized students. However, history is embedded within people’s social identities and is integral to their understanding of societal hierarchies. Post-oppression claims that criticize safe spaces also deny the continued existence and significance of microaggressions—brief and commonplace verbal, behavioral, and environmental indignities that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative racial- ethnic slights and insults, be they intentional or unintentional.³¹

My own experiences may help reveal the fallacy that American institutions of higher learning are post-oppression. I experienced my first microaggression as a faculty member my second week on campus, when I was still dressing in my best outfits. When I started at the University of Chicago in 2004, my department was in a lovely converted historical house. Because I had a forty-five-minute commute, I left home early to avoid traffic. As I walked to my building on a largely deserted street early in the morning, I recognized a young White woman who was the project manager for one of my colleagues. She was walking toward me on the sidewalk. I smiled, but she did not smile back. I shrugged it off and proceeded to follow her up the path to the door. When she reached the door, she turned quickly, braced her back against the door, clutched her purse to her chest, and breathlessly stated that I would have to come back later because “we don’t let people in this early.” It took a second to register that although we had been formally introduced and she had seen me passing in the hallway at least a few times, and I was wearing one of my best outfits, in that moment, she was unable to recognize me as anything other than a threat. I then did what I had long ago learned to do: smile and allay her fears. I reminded her that I am the new faculty member (the only non-White faculty member) in the department, showed her my keys, and soothed her feelings of embarrassment. I then kept my day moving; this was not the first and would not be the last time that my blackness would override everything else. Did I mention that I was wearing one of my best outfits?

I experienced my most recent microaggression in April 2016, a few months before I began this book. Again, I got to campus early (note to self: maybe I should stop getting to campus early). I stopped at the Grounds of Being, the Divinity School’s student-run coffee shop, and as I was pouring my coffee, I heard “my niggas … and my niggas …” coming from a Drake song playing loudly over the sound system. The volume itself was an issue that early in the morning, but what disturbed me was the unexpected jolt of hearing those words in an institution that is not “down with niggas.” I was the only Black person in the coffee shop; all others were White, except for one Asian individual.

I told the student behind the counter that “I’m going to need you to change that song.” At first, she was bewildered by my request but quickly recovered and looked at me with incredulity. I repeated my request with a little more intensity, at which time the other White female student behind the counter asked what was happening. Once informed by the first student, she turned to me and firmly stated, “We don’t make judgments here. We play all music.” Again, I repeated my request with enough intensity that the first student quickly changed the song. She then attempted to chastise me for my judgmental intellectual immaturity. At that point I could have provided some information about who I was and engaged her in an intellectual discussion of the issue. Instead, I chose to tick the Grounds of Being off as one more place on campus to avoid.

Though in both of those interactions I was the higher-status individual based on my achieved status at the university, American society granted each of those White women, at birth, an ascribed status that supersedes credentialed status. However, what my achieved status and years of developing adaptive coping skills do afford me is the ability to prevent microaggressive experiences from derailing my day. Historically marginalized students need safe spaces to develop those affordances—perceptions of the world that determine their possibilities for action.

Those who oppose safe spaces make empirically false arguments that fail to understand the experiences of minority college students. Minority college students have more diverse friendship networks than majority students, learn from faculty who do not represent their backgrounds, and attempt to obtain support from administrators who lack an experiential understanding of the families and communities the students grew up in.³² In other words, minority students navigate unequal power relations in almost all aspects of their college experiences. Safe spaces, then, can be thought of as providing respite and restoration, enabling minority students to continue engaging in the “clash of ideas.” As noted by Morton Schapiro, Northwestern University’s president, in a January 2016 Washington Post op-ed, “students don’t fully embrace uncomfortable learning unless they are themselves comfortable.”

It is clear to me that those arguing against the need for identity-affirming counterspaces do not understand the identity-based challenges that marginalized students encounter—the constant reminders of the aspects of their social identities that prevent them from equal membership in the larger student body, the toll of the psychological and emotional “energy and resources [they devote] to understanding and responding to involuntarily being positioned as a [marginalized] subject.”³³

The co-opting of safe spaces has placed marginalized students in a defensive position. Their request for identity-affirming supports such as safe spaces now threatens their academic identity when safe spaces are described as antithetical to college student development. Many news articles and op-eds have stuck to polemic arguments that position students as either intellectually and emotionally sophisticated enough to engage ideologies that challenge their own or too intellectually and emotionally immature to tolerate ideological diversity.

In contrast to these polemic arguments, Alison Cook-Sather, a professor at Bryn Mawr College, describes how being introduced to the concept of “brave spaces” illuminated her misunderstanding of what marginalized students are requesting.³⁴ She had previously understood safe spaces as contexts that precluded the possibility of intellectual challenge, discomfort, and risk, not places for students to take intellectual risks. However, once introduced to the concept of brave spaces, a concept used in the literatures of critical race, Latinx critical, intersectional, social justice, and Black feminists, she realized safe spaces’ rightful place on college campuses.

Essentially, safe spaces are brave spaces. Because people who create formal and informal safe spaces see themselves in each other, they enter a collective commitment to ensuring that each other’s humanity will not be invalidated during discussions and debates. Safe spaces thereby enable marginalized students to be brave in their critique of themselves and their group in ways they cannot in contexts where they must defend the very validity of that group membership.

Because of the distorting and co-opting of “safe spaces,” I am discarding that term and advocating for counterspaces. Counterspaces are “revolutionary settings embedded within larger settings and contexts. That is, they are pockets of resistance that may, to one extent or another, disrupt the dominant narrative of the larger setting and context.”³⁵ This means that, yes, counterspaces are designed exclusively for individuals from marginalized groups, but they can welcome individuals from advantaged groups, so long as those individuals adhere to the goal of supporting adaptive responding. Adaptive responding is the constellation of emotional, psychological, and behavioral capacities that enable marginalized individuals to cope with and resist oppression, thereby exhibiting resilience. In counterspaces, college students wrestle with radical ideas, develop self-narratives that challenge stereotypes, share instrumental knowledge about the rights of marginalized individuals, and experience growth along numerous other dimensions that can only occur when students are challenged by like-minded peers.³⁶

The idea that one can be challenged by like-minded peers is where many reflexive objectors of counterspaces get stuck. A counterspace filled with Black and Latinx college students may have as a common denominator individuals with direct experiences with oppression and marginalization in educational spaces. Beyond this, however, all bets are off with regard to a universal set of experiences, attitudes, or beliefs. Because, in such a counterspace, individuals do not have to debate the existence of marginalization and oppression, they are freed to move on to deeper, more radical discussions.

A large body of social and psychological research on identity undergird the varied presentations of formal and informal counterspaces discussed throughout this book; counterspaces can be ideational, relational, and/or physical spaces, and have academic, social, cultural, and/or political goals. I lean on the work of Na’ilah Suad Nasir and others who draw our attention to the cultural aspects of educational institutions and learning that occurs therein—taken-for-granted social practices and expectations that can place marginalized students’ social identities in conflict with their educational identity.³⁷ I stand on the work that Beverly Tatum and others have done to unpack the reasons why youth of a given racial-ethnic group often gather in particular physical spaces within educational contexts, and place this phenomenon within a framework of normative identity development.³⁸ Lastly, I borrow from the work of Daniel Solorzano and others who use critical race frameworks to show how counterspaces provide marginalized students with sites of resistance that enable them to name, critique, and counter stereotypical understandings of their group.³⁹

Grounding Our Understandings in a Critical Examination of Students’ Experiences

Because most college administrators and professors did not grow up in Black, Latinx, or socioeconomically disadvantaged households, they lack the depth of understanding necessary to develop identity-affirming supports. Given the brief and perfunctory nature of most social interactions, it is almost impossible to understand the perspectives of those with background and status characteristics that are markedly different from one’s own. Only by digging deep into students’ experiences of their college campuses can we understand the positions of marginalized and underrepresented students in relation to the culture and structure of the institution.

Critical race theories enable this examination by foregrounding in all aspects of the research process race-ethnicity, racism, and discrimination.⁴⁰ These theories center race-ethnicity as a salient social category that is used to identify individuals as belonging to distinct, hierarchically organized groups, and through processes of social interaction, race-ethnicity becomes internalized as identity.⁴¹ Critical race theories further clarify that it is because race is a social concept (embedded in hierarchical interpersonal interactions) rather than a physiological concept (genetically distinct and biologically measurable), that it maintains its significance in the face of evidence disconfirming its biological reality. Latinx critical theories push past the Black-White binary and articulate discrimination as a salient part of the Latinx American experience.⁴² Latinx critical frameworks theorize issues such as language, immigration, culture, identity, and phenotype that are distinct in Latinxs’ experiences of oppression, identification, and identity in the United States.⁴³ By situating this research within critical race and Latinx critical theories, I am able to privilege college-going Black and Latinx students’ experiential knowledge as legitimate without the need to ground them in direct comparisons to students of other racial-ethnic groups.

In subsequent chapters, my coauthors and I attempt to unpack many of the assumptions about who college students should be, whether race-ethnicity should be integral to their academic identity, and how they should relate to institutions of higher learning. In discussing our findings, when there are no differences between Black and Latinx students we discuss them as a group. We will also highlight differences among Latinx students and among Black students because gender, class background, parent education, political identity, acculturation, and numerous other social identities matter. Critical race and Latinx critical theories foreground intersectionality, which is the understanding that key status characteristics such as race-ethnicity, gender, national origin, class, and sexuality are indivisible in understanding people’s experiences of the social world. Latinx, immigrant, queer, lower-income college women experience campus differently from Latinx, American, heterosexual, middle-income college women.⁴⁴ As Na’ilah Suad Nasir discusses in her book, Racialized Identities: Race and Achievement among African American Youth, knowing a student’s racial-ethnic identity and identification tells us important but never enough information.

To guard against the human tendency toward abstracting simple patterns and simplistic explanations, we excerpt a broad range of students’ voices throughout this book. Each chapter attempts to ensure that no one student’s experiences dominate (except chapter 2) and provides enough information about each student to ensure they are not flattened into one-dimensional caricatures of themselves. Some chapters could only be written by providing the arc of students’ experiences over their first-year transition. For those chapters, we detail the experiences of three to four students who represent the full range of the larger sample. Other chapters are more thematic and include excerpts from many students’ experiences to ensure that the diverse ways that a singular issue was experienced and understood are richly presented.

I take seriously Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s admonishments regarding the danger of a single story. “The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.”⁴⁵ Complex understandings can emerge by sharing the differences as well as similarities in how several Black and Latinx students experience the transition to historically White colleges and universities. Also included are the narratives of students who dispute the need for counterspaces that affirm their racial-ethnic identity, or believe that their racial-ethnic identity is best affirmed in racially-ethnically heterogeneous counterspaces. Presenting one unified argument in favor of counterspaces runs the risk of making them an oppressive expectation for Black and Latinx students who choose to locate their campus home elsewhere.

My coauthors and I analyzed a considerable amount of data in writing this book. Although the first-year transition is highlighted, at the writing of this book we had interviewed seventy students for three consecutive summers and invited the larger sample of 533 students to complete seven waves of online surveys. The narratives presented here illustrate much of what we have learned about how students’ social identities are associated with their transition to college. We focus on students’ narratives because identities are essentially the compilation of the stories we tell to say who we are, and the stories we tell about who our people are. On rare occasions we bring in findings from the larger survey sample.

A Brief Summary of the Minority College Cohort Study

We recruited students from five historically White colleges and universities in the Midwest: 24 percent were recruited from two urban private institutions; 35 percent were recruited from an urban public institution; 28 percent were recruited from a rural public institution; and 13 percent were recruited from a suburban public institution. The sample is ethnically diverse. Latinx students specified their belonging to a diverse range of ethnic national origin groups, such as Mexican, Puerto Rican, South American, and Cuban. Black students specified their belonging to a diverse range of ethnic, national origin groups, such as Haitian, Nigerian, African, African American, and Caribbean. The majority of Latinx students self-identified as Mexican American (68 percent), and the majority of Black students identified as African American (84 percent).

All participants were first-time freshmen who had recently graduated from high school. The students came from more than 255 different high schools. All were enrolled as full-time students and were, on average, age eighteen at enrollment.⁴⁶ The overwhelming majority (90 percent) were in-state students, and most attended high schools in the Chicago metropolitan area. The majority (60 percent) were first-generation college students, where neither parent has a four-year degree. Latinx students were particularly disadvantaged with regard to parent education; 28 percent of Latinx students’ parents did not have a high school diploma or GED, compared to only 5 percent of Black students’ parents.

The summer after their first year in college, we randomly selected seventy students after stratifying the sample by race-ethnicity, gender, and level of financial distress reported on the survey. A team of three male and three female Latinx and Black interviewers completed in-person interviews, or phone interviews with a small number of students who were out of state at the time. By the time of the interviews, participants had completed three online surveys during the course of the first year. During the interviews, students reflected on the process of deciding to go and applying to college, their experiences regarding the transition and adjustment to college, their financial struggles in paying for college, and how their family supported them along the way. Students talked about their social and academic challenges and about the people they turned to for support. Lastly, they talked about their immediate plans for getting through college and their career aspirations.

A research team of eleven scholars, representing a diverse range of racial-ethnic groups, class backgrounds, and immigration histories collectively coded and analyzed the interviews to ensure that no one voice or perspective biased data interpretation. Much of this collective feedback was aimed at keeping one another open to unexamined patterns and explanations for observed patterns. This involved suggesting alternative strategies for comparing and contrasting cases, alternative and additional ideas for the coding the text, and concepts and theoretical frames from allied disciplines. Through a collective and iterative process, we created a master list of codes. All transcripts were first coded by a randomly chosen primary coder and then a randomly chosen secondary coder. Subsets of team members then delved into more detailed sub-coding based on the focus of each chapter.