Utilizing an academic capital framework and student perspectives, this chapter provides insight into the ways that programs and services can help students develop the skills needed to succeed in college.
In this paper, critical race theory and critical race praxis for educational research are used to frame an analysis of the 1998 Amendments to the Higher Education Act of 1965 (HEA98) that limits access to financial aid for students who have been convicted of a drug felony. The authors explain how the HEA98 disenfranchises Black and Latinx college student populations. This policy is a form of institutional racism against the disproportionately large number of Black and Latinx individuals that have been convicted of drug-related crimes, which creates a caste system of college access and support. This policy analysis highlights data on incarcerated populations that link the policing of drug offenses to racial profiling and discrimination (e.g., “the War on Drugs” and the 1994 Crime Bill), questions the motivations for reducing access to education in drug offenders, reviews causes and inhibitors of recidivism in drug offenders to make the case for the promotion of education in recently-released offenders, and highlights empirical data that supports expanding access to these people. The authors conclude the paper with recommendations to progress toward racial educational equity. This paper is directed toward higher education scholars, practitioners, and policy makers who possess a strategic critical orientation towards racial equity in education.
When I was 6 years old, I entered foster care, along with my brother and my sister-our lives changed forever. I did not have the language then, but I quickly learned that the foster care system was not at all caring. My siblings and I encountered a system built on what Rodríguez (2006Rodríguez ( , 2018 calls carceral logics, that is the surveillance, criminalization, and separation of communities and families (nuclear and non-nuclear) under the assumption of assistance and safety.In alignment with Rodríguez's assertion, I argue in this paper that the foster care system is neither a benevolent nor neutral system. Instead, it operates as an oppressive force that disenfranchises children and families. Foster care and congregate care facilities (e.g., group homes) track young people into prison; it is a system that punishes, similar to a juridical entity (Johnson, 2021b). For student affairs professionals in higher education who work with students who have experienced foster care, I offer recommendations to counter the negative effects of the family regulation system and to promote more humanizing educational experiences. This should be important to our communities because we are under-preparing and under-educating hundreds of thousands of young people for college and ultimately for life. This is a social justice issue.
Higher education practices and policies are rooted in racism and imperialism. This causes physical and emotional harm to BIPOC students. Yet, student affairs practitioners and higher education leaders struggle to stay conscious of the relationships between macro structures of oppression and their deleterious educational, economic, health, and social consequences, when it comes time to assess, understand, and intervene in campus crises and racialized violence. Borrowing from the medical field, this paper offers “structural competency” as a framework for student affairs education and practice toward supporting practitioners prepared to mitigate systemic racism and to identify the social determinants of inequity. Structural competency in student affairs means having the capacity to understand and take actions toward addressing the root causes of BIPOC students’ marginalization in historically white campus contexts. It requires deep attention to how these causes—polices, institutional norms, infrastructures, and the hegemonic beliefs embedded in our economic, social, and political systems—interact with students’ lived experiences on campus. Guided by a Critical Race Theory lens, structural competency moves us toward confronting the downstream consequences of upstream decisions such as admissions standards that disenfranchise BIPOC students, or how the federal financial aid formula fails to account for equity in home ownership which disproportionately harms Black families for the benefit of white ones, because of antiblack U.S. policies such as redlining, making college less accessible for BIPOC students. This paper argues that such a structural competency framework and mindset in policy and practice is crucial for higher education leaders confronting systemic institutional policies that have a cumulative and ongoing oppressive impact on BIPOC students.
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