This chapter examines the barriers that prohibit poor and working-class students from accessing and engaging in leadership development experiences. Suggestions to inventory these costs and reshape leadership education to be more inclusive to students from poor or working-class backgrounds are included.

This quantitative study examined the material hardships experiences of LGBTQ students at research universities. Using a series of regression analyses, we find relationships between students' sexual identity and experiencing material hardship, including differential relationships when disaggregating by sexual orientation. These results identify…

This qualitative research is aimed at studying how Universidad Mayor and Universidad de Santiago address inclusion, equity, and diversity in the processes of access and continued studies of economically and socially disadvantaged students who benefited from the Free Tuition State Policy and how these processes are perceived by this type of…

This article discusses from a critical education perspective what it is like to be a Dalit (former untouchable) student studying at an elite university in India. Much writing on exclusion and discrimination in higher education is focused on power relations such as gender, race, ethnicity and religion. This article broadens this focus to consider…

This qualitative study explores the educational experiences of African American students from the rural region of Alabama commonly known at the Black Belt and how the resources they received helped them prepare and gain access to higher education. The purpose of this study was to examine how factors such as rurality, race and class impact rural…

While a significant minority cohort, Australian Aboriginal women are increasingly attending university. However, their experiences remain largely undocumented in the literature. This study focused on the experience of eight female Aboriginal students who completed an Indigenous-only bridging course where they watched the film, Educating Rita,…

Largely because it puts higher education within reach for all people, the community college is thought to play a vital role in the democratic functioning of American society. Partly driven by an ethos of American egalitarianism, low-cost and open access community colleges enroll, train, and educate nearly anyone who aspires to higher education.…

This article presents a qualitative study concerning the experience of three pre-service Dalit teacher trainees with their upper caste classmates, programme instructors and coping strategies adopted by them to counter social and academic challenges at a well-known public university in India. Data for the study were collected through interviews…

The purpose of this study was to ascertain the extent to which Black undergraduate women are engaging in High-Impact Practices (HIPs) while attending a predominately White institution of higher education and to explore how race, class and/or gender intersect to affect levels of engagement with HIPs. This study used an explanatory mixed methods…

Current research on the achievement gap between low-income minority students and their more affluent white peers is saturated with studies of academic failure rather than investigations that address the processes that mitigate failure and create success. Most of the existing research provides extensive critiques without exploring strategies that…

Background/Context: The experiences of Latina youth in the United States are embedded within a larger social context influenced by gender, ethnic/racial identity, socioeconomic status, language, and sociospatial and political characteristics that can negatively impact their daily lived experiences. Given the challenges that young Latinas…

This article examines the inclusion of disabled students in the UK and Swedish higher education systems. In the United Kingdom, performance indicators focus on the participation rate of disabled students in comparison with those of non-disabled students, while in Sweden there are no specific performance indicators relating to disabled students.…

In 2012 Spain inaugurated a reform of its higher education financial aid system inspired by three principles: cost-sharing, increasing academic performance and school efficiency. This reform has shifted the aim of the system from equality of access to a type of meritocracy that can be defined as class-biased, as it is only applied to low-income…

Most new students experience school to university transition as challenging. Students from backgrounds with little or no experience of higher education are most vulnerable in this transition, and most at risk of academic failure. Emotion appears implicated in the differential way in which first-generation students and students with family…

This multi-institutional study examines differences between working-class and middle/upper-class students at large, public research universities. Significant differences in factors related to working-class students' social integration (including satisfaction, campus climate, and sense of belonging) and academic integration (including collaborative…