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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.

International efforts to increase equity, quality and access in primary education increasingly include calls to expand governance and educational resources by fostering partnerships between governments and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). This chapter examines a partnership between India’s largest educational NGO, Pratham, and the governments of Uttar Pradesh and Himachal Pradesh in Northern India. Pratham has created and implemented state-specific quality improvement programs in an effort to raise the learning achievements of marginalized students in government schools. Although the programs significantly raised achievement among children at the lowest levels of learning, the chapter argues that the most lasting success of these initiatives is in affecting education policy through advocacy, changing state behavior and raising the consciousness of people and governments regarding vital education issues.

This chapter lays out the argument for shifting social identities from the margin to the center of how universities engage with students from historically marginalized groups. It does this by showing that even when minority students intentionally attempt to “move beyond” their social identities and embody a humanist identity, they are regularly tripped up by how they are identified by others, and by the psychic energy they must expend to deny, to themselves, their experiences of prejudice. To some extent, simple demographics predestine particular American racial-ethnic groups to be minorities on college campuses, but the marginalization that Black and Latinx students experience is an institutionally constructed phenomenon. To be minoritized is to be a member of a group that is both less in number and has less power and more stigma than other groups. And it is the combination of being both in the demographic minority and negatively stereotyped—having to interact with peers and professors who hold racialized stereotypes about academic potential—that leads Black and Latinx students in historically White colleges and universities to experience marginalization in ways that implicate both their racial-ethnic and academic identities.

This chapter delves into how financial distress is associated with how students make sense of the “opportunity” to attend college. Many of the financially distressed students believed they had to attend college to secure their economic futures but doubted that obtaining their degree would ensure financial stability. Their experiences illustrate the large role that one's relative financial position plays in identity and sense of belonging on campus. The chapter asserts that counterspaces for economically marginalized students can help to alleviate this identity challenge. Counterspaces that bring students together around financial issues can reduce the negative identity effects of financial distress by changing their narrative from an individual to a structural framing.

This chapter focuses on Aoki’s career in the East Bay community college system. Aoki spent his twenty-five-year career in the community college system, using his positions as instructor, counselor, and intermittent administrator to help the working-class students and staff around him to achieve some measure of fulfillment and equality. Aoki resolved the duality of the education system by teaching about critical social issues, providing leadership to his colleagues, and providing academic counseling to marginalized students. He also found ways to work with people with varied methods and diverse political beliefs for creating change. In the end, Aoki was proud of the ways he translated his strivings for freedom and justice toward enabling working-class youth, students of color, and the faculty and staff around him to attain some degree of equality.