Substantial disparities in college enrollment rates exist across racial and socioeconomic groups in the United States. A key goal of education policy is to help remediate this inequity by providing equal opportunity and access to all students. However, to develop better policy, one needs to understand the underlying causes of these disparities.…

Access to higher education begins with a student's decision whether and where to apply to college. This paper examines racial and ethnic differences in college application behavior of high school graduates, using two recent graduation cohorts from Texas. We estimate racial and ethnic differences in the probability of applying to college,…

This qualitative case study investigated how the GEAR-Up college readiness program influenced the postsecondary decisions of Hispanic students who participated in the GEAR-Up program for the recommended six-year period in a rural school district in Texas. It was not known how long-term participation in the GEAR-Up program at a rural school…

Despite a generation of efforts to make higher education an achievable goal for all students, the gap in college participation rates between low-income and high-income students has not narrowed. Moreover, students of color continue to be underrepresented on postsecondary campuses. Early intervention efforts and college outreach programs such as…

In the first decade of the 21st century, the nation, the states, and colleges and universities began to grapple with the challenges of globalization, changing demography, the implications of the digital era, and of a less expansive public sector. Although not a transformative period for higher education, the decade saw significant innovations in…