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Amy Aldous Bergerson. College Choice and Access to College: Moving Policy, Research, and Practice to the 21st Century. ASHE Higher Education Report (Vol. 35, No. 4). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2010. 152 pp. Paper $29.00. ISBN 978-0-470-61391-7
Among the most vexing challenges we face as a society is social inequality, for which our education system is at once the problem, by propagating disadvantages through disparate access to opportunities, and the solution, by delivering programs and services that aim to eradicate disadvantages. Over the past half-century, the American education system has witnessed steady growth in educational aspirations, postsecondary participation rates, and the variety of educational options available to college students.
Despite these gains and the sustained concentration among policymakers, there remain socioeconomic and racial/ethnic disparities in college access, and the literature offers surprisingly few examples of research that reviews and synthesizes extant theory and evidence on this important topic. Amy Bergerson's 2010 ASHE Higher Education Report titled College Choice and Access to College: Moving Policy, Research, and Practice to the 21st Century, responds to this need by summarizing trends in current research and discussing ways to increase access to higher education for students from disadvantaged backgrounds.
The report makes at least three notable contributions. First, Bergerson synthesizes college choice research from the 1990s and first decade of the 21st century with a concentration on low-income students and students of color. Bergerson adds clarity to the large body of research on college choice that has emerged over the past 20 years by building on and delivering an important companion piece to Paulsen's 1990 ASHE-ERIC Higher Education Report and Perna's 2006 chapter in the Higher Education Handbook.
Second, the monograph describes theoretical perspectives that inform research on student decision-making and access to educational opportunity. Bergerson introduces, defines,...