Chapter Five: Horse to Water

  1. . The section on Southwest Tennessee Community College draws on Maria Ines Zamudio, “Degree of Success,” The Commercial Appeal, December 1, 2014, as well as Emily Ford, “Staying in College Is the Hardest Part,” The Commercial Appeal, May 27, 2007. The material on state funding for Southwest comes from my 2015 interview with Steven P. Gentile, Director of Fiscal Policy Research, Tennessee Higher Education Commission.

  2. . The statistics on graduation rates come from College Navigator, an online tool from the National Center for Education Statistics: https://nces.ed.gov/collegenavigator/. Because of differences in when I downloaded the data from the website, the MTSU stats are for students who started in the fall of 2008, the U of M stats are for those who started in the fall of 2007, and the Rhodes stats are for those who started in the fall of 2006—that said, the rates didn’t change much from year to year.

  3. . Caroline M. Hoxby and Christopher Avery, “The Missing One-Offs: The Hidden Supply of High-Achieving, Low Income Students” (working paper, National Bureau of Economic Research, no. 18586, December 2012), http://www.nber.org/papers/w18586. See also Sandra E. Black, Kalena E. Cortes and Jane Arnold Lincove, “Apply Yourself: Racial and Ethnic Differences in College Application” (working paper, National Bureau of Economic Research, no. 21368, July 2015). http://www.nber.org/papers/w21368

  4. . Anthony P. Carnevale and Jeff Strohl, Separate and Unequal: How Higher Education Reinforces the Intergenerational Reproduction of White Racial Privilege (Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, July 2013). https://cew.georgetown.edu/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/SeparateUnequal.FR_.pdf

  5. . Holly K. Hacker, “Federal Data Show What Families Really Pay for College,” The Dallas Morning News, March 7, 2014. See also Jon Marcus and Holly K. Hacker, “Colleges Continue to Put Burden of Price Hikes on Poorest, New Figures Show,” Education Writers Association, November 29, 2014. http://www.ewa.org/key-coverage/colleges-continue-put-burden-price-hikes-poorest-new-figures-show (accessed December 2, 2015).

  6. . See the report Student Loan Servicing: Analysis of Public Input and Recommendations for Reform (Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, September 2015), http://files.consumerfinance.gov/f/201509_cfpb_student-loan-servicing-report.pdf, as well as Gretchen Morgenson, “A Debt Setup That’s Failing the Students,” The New York Times, October 11, 2015.

  7. . Adam Looney and Constantine Yannelis, A Crisis in Student Loans? How Changes in the Characteristics of Borrowers and in the Institutions They Attended Contributed to Rising Loan Defaults (Brookings Institution, September 2015). http://www.brookings.edu/about/projects/bpea/papers/2015/looney-yannelis-student-loan-defaults

  8. . John Maggio and Martin Smith, “College, Inc.” Frontline, May 4, 2010. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/collegeinc/ (accessed August 2015). See also Tamar Lewin, “Report Finds Low Graduation Rates at For-profit Colleges,” The New York Times, November 24, 2010.

  9. . Trends in Debt for Bachelor’s Degree Recipients a Year after Graduation: 1994, 2001 and 2009 (U.S. Department of Education Report, NCES 2013-156, December 2012). http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2013/2013156.pdf. For default rates, see The Condition of Education 2015 (The National Center for Education Statistics), chapter 4, Student Loan Volume and Default Rates, pp. 230–233. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/pdf/coe_cug.pdf

  10. . Nicholas N. Nagle, Randy Gustafson, and Charlynn Burd, A Profile of the Hispanic Population in the State of Tennessee (The University of Tennessee Center for Business and Economic Research, August 2012), pp. 17–18. http://cber.bus.utk.edu/census/hisp/bfox288.pdf

  11. . Between Two Worlds: How Young Latinos Come of Age in America (Washington, DC: Pew Hispanic Center, December 11, 2009). http://www.pewhispanic.org/2009/12/11/between-two-worlds-how-young-latinos-come-of-age-in-america/

  12. . Roberto G. Gonzalez, Young Lives on Hold: The College Dreams of Undocumented Students (College Board Advocacy, April 2009). https://secure-media.collegeboard.org/digitalServices/pdf/professionals/young-lives-on-hold-undocumented-students.pdf

  13. . Michael Riley, “Immigrants Shut Out of Colleges,” The Denver Post, August 11, 2002.

  14. . Letter to the editor, The Gazette (Colorado Springs, Colorado), September 17, 2002.

  15. . Helen Thorpe, Just Like Us: The True Story of Four Mexican Girls Coming of Age in America (New York: Scribner, 2009), pp. 50–51.