A Guiding Hand

This chapter examines how the intersection of students' race-ethnicity and gender is associated with their motivational orientation toward college. Students' motivational orientations were evident in their reasons for going to college and in their adjustment struggles during the first year. This chapter focuses on how Latinx men's motivational orientations can either align them with or place them at odds with their institutions' dominant cultural orientation. In comparison to Black men, Latinx men were more likely to come from very low-educated and immigrant families. This means that their home life did not include access to a knowledgeable adult who could guide them through the college process, from its very beginning in dealing with applications, school choice, and financial aid, to advice for managing the stress of finals week or support in persistence decisions.

Importance of a Critical Mass

This chapter turns to the role of racial-ethnic identity-based campus organizations in helping or hindering students to manage feelings of being othered. Upon arrival on campus, racial-ethnic minority students find themselves dramatically outnumbered by White students, taught by largely White professors, and learning about White historical figures and artifacts. Because of the segregated nature of American K–12 schooling, this shift into suddenly being racially-ethnically outnumbered can be a significant challenge to campus integration. Mounting feelings of social isolation add an additional layer of stress atop an already difficult transition. Away from home for the first time, many minority students feel culturally lost as they begin their new life as college students. Students' perspectives on being othered ranged from feeling that their peers appreciated their differences to feeling stereotyped as the sole representative of their group. The extent to which they had counterspaces helped them process those feelings and celebrate their differences as diversity.

Outlining the Problem

This chapter presents the problem and briefly describes the data used to gain insight into how challenges to Black and Latinx students' college-going identity threaten their persistence. It shows how it is important to quantify the racialization of college access and success at the outset. Race scholars have to start with empirical questions about why things are the way they are. Furthermore, they must push forward theoretical understandings that help us to explicate and end racial oppression. 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.