Beating the Odds: How the Poor Get to College (Jossey Bass Higher & Adult Education Series) - Hardcover

Levine, Arthur; Nidiffer, Jana

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0787901326 ISBN 13: 9780787901325

Publisher: Jossey-Bass, 1995

Synopsis

Explores why some financially disadvantaged people manage to overcome obstacles and achieve success in college and identifies the factors that make the difference.

About this title

From the Inside Flap

Students from families in the bottom twenty-five percent in income are eight times less likely to graduate college than those in the rest of the population. Still, some are able to overcome the most desperate circumstances and achieve the seemingly unreachable goal of a college degree. What happened in this lives that enabled them to succeed when so many others fell short?Beating the Odds combines poignant stories of teenagers and adults from severely disadvantaged backgrounds with the highly literate writing style of renowned educator Arthur Levine to explore how some people manage to overcome the obstacles and achieve success in college. Levine and coauthor Jana Nidiffer identify the factors that made the difference and provide powerful advice to colleges, universities, communities, and families for smoothing the path to higher education for more of our nation's disadvantaged youth.Drawing on their own study of twenty-four poor, first-generation college students, which includes poor older adults attAnding community college, the authors detail the factors--relationships, resources, and activities--that made a difference and allowed these students to go as far as they did. They explain, for instance, the critical role of a mentor in the lives of each of these successful students, examining where the mentors came from, how they gained their strong faith in education, and how they "worked" as mentors. And they include their recommAndations about what higher education policy toward the poor should look like to be most effective in the future.

From the Back Cover

"Levine and Nidiffer have tacked an extremely complex and much-neglected problem in contemporary America and they do it with intelligence, grace, and compassion. They also show that something can be done about it. Every educator and policymaker should read this book." --Alexander W. Astin, professor of higher education and director of the Higher Education Research Institute, University of California, Los AngelesLevine and Nidiffer combine an engaging writing style with poignant stories of teenagers and adults from severely disadvantaged backgrounds. Using the stories they explain, for instance, the critical role of mentors in the lives of successful students, examining where the mentors came from, how they gained their strong faith in education, and how they worked as mentors. The authors ask the most crucial question: Is it possible to reproduce those factors and thereby provide college opportunity and access for disadvantaged people generally? And they conclude with recommAndations about what social and educational policy toward the poor should look like to be most effective in the future.

About this edition

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0787901326
• ISBN 13: 9780787901325
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 204