Chapter Four: How To Succeed Summary and Analysis

In the mid-1990's, the American college graduation rate was the highest in the world. Since then, however, the rate has fallen behind other successful nations, such as the United Kingdom, Australia, Poland, Norway, and South Korea. While college graduate numbers in America have risen since the 1970's, the numbers highlight an increasingly alarming class-divide: "the rate of BA attainment among wealthy students with at least one parent who had graduated from college rose from 61 percent to 68 percent while ... the rate among ... students in the lowest income quartile whose parents were not college graduates actually fell from 11.1 percent to 9.5 percent" (Page 149). For years, educators were focused on one thing: how to encourage disadvantaged youth to graduate from high school and enroll in college. The problem seems to be that once the students are...