Recognizing and Serving Low-Income Students in Higher Education: An Examination of Institutional Policies, Practices, and Culture ed. by Adrianna Kezar (review)

Trends in college participation and degree attainment in the United States are revealing both good and bad news. With a shift to a knowledge-based economy and with postsecondary degrees increasingly a prerequisite for work, the massification of higher education has led to more high school graduates aspiring to attend college. However, despite high postsecondary educational aspirations being shared across racial and economic groups, there continue to be significant disparities in college access and success—a trend that has even increased in some cases. With regard to economic groups, for example, from 1975 to 2005, four-year college degree attainment gaps between low-income and high-income students increased from 31 percent to 62 percent. Recognizing and Serving Low-Income Students in Higher Education, edited by Adrianna Kezar, examines and critiques existing practices, policies, and structures that contribute to these trends while offering strategies and solutions to institutional barriers for low-income students who are too often overlooked and underserved.

As Kezar and her colleagues point out in this book, the massification of higher education has led to differentiation in the quality and accessibility of an array of programs for students that vary by social class background. Low-income students are also concentrated at the lower ranks of the postsecondary education system in programs with poor records of student completion. Additionally, there are issues that low-income students face with regard to how they are perceived and treated relative to other students on campus. Kezar utilizes post-structuralism to critically examine the normative and dominant values that lead to practices that advantage middle- and high-income students while disadvantaging low-income students.

The book is framed around a conceptual model that consists of exposing privilege for one group of students and disenfranchisement for another group of students ("revelation"); examining the impact of institutional structures, policies, and practices that contribute to these occurrences ("deconstruction"); and providing ideas for new approaches to structures, policies, and practices ("reconstruction"). The latter point in this framework is most encouraging, as post-structuralists are often criticized for their inability to move beyond deconstruction to engage in implications for practice and policy. Kezar and her colleagues go one step further from describing the causes and consequences of the stratification of college opportunities for low-income students to discussing promising new and existing efforts to decrease the current disparities in college attainment and post-college outcomes for these students—the central premise being that equitable college access and success require policies and practices designed explicitly to reduce barriers currently facing marginalized groups. Movement in this direction requires a fundamentally different perspective on how we understand, design, and implement programs and services for low-income students— an approach that is more critical and forward thinking and views low-income students as assets and not a deficit for higher education.

The book is divided into five parts. Part 1 consists of a chapter by Kezar that provides background and context while offering a discussion about post-structuralism and its application to and framing for the subsequent chapters in book. Part 2 consists of three chapters that examine issues of access to higher education. St. John provides an analysis of the University of Indiana's 21st Century Scholars Program. Chambers and Deller discuss postsecondary educational options for students in Canada and England. Also, Perna, Lundy-Wagner, Yee, Brill, and Tadal discuss the role of institutional financial aid policies and the ways in which language and information about financial aid policies are barriers to access to and use of aid. Part 3 examines issues of entering and transitioning into college. Walpole critiques the use of deficit approaches to working with low-income college students, Colyar discusses the implications for the treatment of low-income students as "others" on campus, and Levin...