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The previous chapter examined how adolescents’ growing maturity, including their college–going identities, can be motivated by a sense of agency and connectedness in the service of their own dreams and those of their families. This chapter considers the second question: what factors lead youth along academic pathways towards or away from college and college–based careers? This chapter examines these pathways and the experiences that shape their access to them. The chapter focuses on a longitudinal study of African American and Latino youth in university pre–college bridging programs, as well as related work with working–class European American youth, among other samples. Findings are aligned with social capital, alienation, and challenge models.

This chapter highlights the stories of immigrant and U.S.-born Latinos raised in North Carolina. It examines the incorporation of Latino youth into U.S. society and their risk of being permanently marginalized economically and socially. The chapter explores the significant challenges that Latino youths face in the multigenerational process of incorporation into U.S. society: learning the English language; engaging in civic participation, and new societal norms and laws; cultivating a sense of identity; and attachment to the receiving communities.

This chapter examines a pattern of aspiration among first- and second-generation, low-income Latino youth participating in a public school biotechnology academy with corporate connections to Silicon Valley industry. In particular, it considers these Latino youth's desire to “give back” to the community by pursuing careers in public service, especially those that monitor and serve at-risk communities. It also explores how students of the “School-to-Career” Biotechnology Academy at Morton High School linked their pattern of aspiration to the school's emphasis on taking responsibility for an at-risk status and experiences of social contradiction and exclusion within their everyday school and community environments. Finally, it discusses the students' aspiration management in relation to a hegemonic social order reproducing race and class hierarchies and to a project of neoliberal governance in which notions of personal responsibility converged with idealizations of the tech private sector.

This chapter examines the education and training of Latino youth within the local and national context, with particular emphasis on the emergent civic agenda around the digital divide in Silicon Valley. It considers the political implications and historical context of this regional “civilizing process” and its relation to a neoliberal politics of educational reform on the national scale by focusing on the production of two kinds of disciplined “subjects” in need of saving: at-risk youth and public educational and nonprofit social-service institutions. It also explores how the realities of the tech-bust era have turned disenfranchised young people, and many who provide services to them, into skeptics of neoliberal reform.