The State of College Access and Completion: Improving College Success for Students from Underrepresented Groups ed. by Laura W. Perna and Anthony P. Jones (review)

Field: Social Sciences (Social Sciences)

Reviewed by: The State of College Access and Completion: Improving College Success for Students from Underrepresented Groups ed. by Laura W. Perna and Anthony P. Jones Pazich Loni Bordoloi Laura W. Perna and Anthony P. Jones (Eds.). The State of College Access and Completion: Improving College Success for Students from Underrepresented Groups. New York: Routledge, 2013. 240 pp. Paperback: $30.00; ISBN 978-0-415-66046-4. The State of College Access and Completion, edited by Laura Perna and Anthony Jones, neatly accomplishes the task of describing the current higher education policy landscape set out in its title and laying out future directions for researchers, policymakers, institutional leaders, and other stakeholders. The impetus for this edited collection, a product of a yearlong seminar series organized by the Advisory Committee on Student Financial Aid, was to develop an understanding of why college completion rates remain stagnant even as college enrollment has dramatically grown, and what federal, state, system, or institutional policies offer the most promise for improvement, particularly for historically underrepresented students. The volume comprehensively but succinctly discusses what is known and what is not known about a range of policy-relevant issues affecting underrepresented students in higher education. Book editors Anthony Jones and Laura Perna respectively provide the introductory and concluding chapters of this volume. The editors have assembled collaborators who ably address a range of policy-relevant topics, including the transition from high school to college (Laura Perna and Elizabeth Kurban); the benefits of proficiency approaches to determining college readiness (David Conley); pathways for non-traditional-aged students, community college students, and students with developmental needs (Debra Bragg, Tatiana Melguizo, Gregory Kienzl, Holly Kosiewicz, Angela Boatman, and Bridget Terry Long); college affordability and accountability (Donald Heller, James Hearn, Anthony Jones, and Elizabeth Kurban), and leveraging new methodological approaches and longitudinal datasets (Stephen Desjardins, Allison Flaster, Donald Hossler, Afet Dundar, and Douglas Shapiro). As the chapter topics make evident, this collection has a synoptic treatment of current policy issues influencing access and completion for low-income, nontraditional, first-generation, and minoritized students yet manages to offer new directions for research, policy, and practice without sacrificing context. The volume’s key strength is articulating the state of knowledge and research on relevant policy areas so that policymakers and practitioners understand what is known and therefore can be acted upon, and so researchers understand what is not known and therefore should be uncovered. Though the book succeeds in being comprehensive overall, the individual chapters can function as stand-alone articles, and some chapters stand out as being particularly important. Laura Perna and Elizabeth Kurban, in their chapter on “Improving College Access and Choice,” discuss a conceptual model developed in prior work involving four nested layers influencing the college enrollment process: the student and family context; the school and community context; the higher education context; and the broader social, economic, and policy context (p. 12). The conceptual framework attempts to capture how the college enrollment process is influenced, directly or indirectly, by the individual’s habitus, that is, as the “internalized system of thoughts, beliefs, and perceptions that is acquired from the immediate environment” and shaped by the social, economic, policy, organizational, and cultural contexts in which he or she is embedded” (p. 14). Based on the conceptual framework, the chapter identifies concrete areas for action to enhance access for underrepresented students, while accurately noting that more research is needed on the enrollment process for those entering for-profit and online higher education programs, a point I discuss below. It would be interesting to see this comprehensive model buttressed with insights from behavioral economics, as Goldrick-Rab and colleagues have attempted specifically in the area of accessing and utilizing financial aid (Goldrick-Rab, Harris, & Trostel, 2009). For example, how can information on the average returns of college attendance influence high school students’ enrollment process, and how might that information need to be tailored and delivered—as one-on-one mentoring, family workshops, online videos, text-messages, or mailed booklets—for different racial/ethnic subgroups? David Conley’s chapter, “Proficiency Approaches for Making More Students College and Career Ready” is quite timely given that the U.S. Department of Education recently allowed selected institutions...