Beating the Odds

Students from families in the bottom twenty-five percent in income are eight times less likely to graduate college than those in the rest of the population. Still, some are able to overcome the most desperate circumstances and achieve the seemingly unreachable goal of a college degree. What happened in this lives that enabled them to succeed when so many others fell short?Beating the Odds combines poignant stories of teenagers and adults from severely disadvantaged backgrounds with the highly literate writing style of renowned educator Arthur Levine to explore how some people manage to overcome the obstacles and achieve success in college. Levine and coauthor Jana Nidiffer identify the factors that made the difference and provide powerful advice to colleges, universities, communities, and families for smoothing the path to higher education for more of our nation2s disadvantaged youth.Drawing on their own study of twenty-four poor, first-generation college students, which includes poor older adults attAnding community college, the authors detail the factors--relationships, resources, and activities--that made a difference and allowed these students to go as far as they did. They explain, for instance, the critical role of a mentor in the lives of each of these successful students, examining where the mentors came from, how they gained their strong faith in education, and how they "worked" as mentors. And they include their recommAndations about what higher education policy toward the poor should look like to be most effective in the future.Levine, Arthur is the author of 'Beating the Odds' with ISBN 9780787901325 and ISBN 0787901326.