Expanding Opportunity in Higher Education

Reports on the challenges facing California and the nation in providing access to higher education during a time of demographic change.The dream of public higher education in America is to provide opportunity for many and to offer transformative help to American communities and the economy. Expanding Opportunity in Higher Education explores the massive challenges facing California and the nation in realizing this goal during a time of enormous demographic change. The immediate focus on California is particularly appropriate given the size of the state-it educates one out of every nine students in the country-and its checkered political record with respect to civil rights and educational inequities. The book includes essays not only by academics looking at the state's educational system as a whole, but also by those within the policy system who are trying to keep it going in difficult times. The contributors show that the destiny of California, and the nation, rests on the courage of policymakers, both within the universities and within the government, to move aggressively to reclaim the hope of millions of students who can make enormous contributions to this society if only given the chance.Patricia Gándara is Professor of Education at the University of California at Davis. She is the author of Over the Ivy Walls: The Educational Mobility of Low-Income Chicanos and the editor of The Dimensions of Time and the Challenge of School Reform, both also published by SUNY Press. Gary Orfield is Professor of Education and Social Policy at Harvard University and has published many books, including Dropouts in America: Confronting the Graduation Rate Crisis. Catherine L. Horn is Assistant Professor of Educational Leadership and Cultural Studies at the University of Houston and the coeditor (with Gary Orfield and Patricia Marin) of Higher Education and the Color Line: College Access, Racial Equity, and Social Change.