A large majority of full-time students pursuing bachelor's degrees at four-year colleges and universities in the United States attend public universities. The struggle, therefore, to improve educational attainment and reduce the marked disparities in outcomes that lead to greater inequalities of all kinds will take place mainly within our nation's public universities. Matthew Chingos, research associate at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and Brookings Institution fellow, and Michael McPherson, president of the Spencer Foundation, discuss the findings in their book, "Crossing the Finish Line: Completing College at America's Public Universities," written with William Bowen, president emeritus of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and Princeton University. The authors built and analyzed massive databases gathered from 21 prestigious flagship universities across the country and essentially all the public universities in the four state systems of Maryland, North Carolina, Ohio and Virginia. Their aim was to search for clues about how to make America's colleges and universities more successful in moving entering students on to graduation. Not surprisingly, no "silver bullets" revealed themselves throughout the course of the authors' work; nevertheless, their findings point toward important steps that colleges and universities, state governments, and the federal government can take to improve college outcomes, particularly for disadvantaged students. (Contains 6 figures, 2 tables and 1 footnote.)