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This chapter presents the problem and briefly describes the data used to gain insight into how challenges to Black and Latinx students' college-going identity threaten their persistence. It shows how it is important to quantify the racialization of college access and success at the outset. Race scholars have to start with empirical questions about why things are the way they are. Furthermore, they must push forward theoretical understandings that help us to explicate and end racial oppression. The goal is to highlight what have become long-standing normative expectations about the racialized aspects of degree attainment that continue to be perceived from the vantage point of individual rather than institutional failings.

This introductory chapter shows how many of the identity challenges that Latinx and Black students experience result from how race-ethnicity increases the likelihood that they are also first-generation college students; that they attended high schools that did not offer a rigorous college preparatory curriculum; that they have to work for pay to afford college; that they cannot be carefree students and must help support the families they left behind; and that they must contend with many other nontraditional college student challenges. It discusses research and news media portrayals of minority student persistence. To that end, the chapter briefly introduces a cohort of approximately five hundred Black and Latinx college freshmen who enrolled in fall 2013. It reveals that these students were asking for access to counterspaces—safe spaces that simultaneously validate and critique one's interconnected self and group identity—that would enable radical growth. Radical growth can be understood as the development of ideas and narratives that challenge dominant representations of and notions about their marginalized identities.

This concluding chapter takes a step back to examine the bigger picture and suggests ways that colleges and universities could achieve greater integration by attending to difference. Latinx and Black students' college-going identity challenges are often created through institutional action and inaction, and can be resolved through institutional action. Higher education has shown itself to be a revolving door that puts too many Latinx and Black students right back outside their walls, with student debt and without a degree that would lead to the wages needed to service that debt. Although the persistence problem has been foregrounded throughout this work, the chapter shows that the broader goal of campus counterspaces is fostering persistence coupled with psychological, emotional, and cultural well-being. Too many studies show that for historically marginalized students, educational success comes at a high personal cost.