'Everybody Say They'll Go to College, but Until You Grow Up, You Don't Really Understand': Examining the Contextual, Relational, and Networked Experiences of College Bound Students from Traditionally Underserved College-Going Population

Over the last four decades, various stakeholders, including scholars, practitioners, and politicians, have championed the adoption of a college for all norm, which touts postsecondary education as an essential tool for individual and societal advancement (McClafferty, McDonough, & Nunez, 2002; Obama, 2015). Contemporaneously, schools, youth programs, and federal, state, and local policies have expanded efforts to enhance equity in educational attainment, targeting students from traditionally underserved college-going backgrounds, including first generation, low income, and minority students. These efforts have been affiliated with a significant increase in the absolute number of students who pursue college immediately following high school (Aud, Hussar, Johnson, Kena, Roth, Manning et al., 2012). National data reveal trends of increased postsecondary enrollment across all student subpopulations (e.g., black, white, and Hispanic students; low income and high income students) (Aud, Fox, & KewalRamani, 2010; Musu-Gillette, Robinson, McFarland, KewalRamani, Zhang, & Wilkinson- Flicker, 2016). However, there is continuing evidence that students from traditionally underserved college-going backgrounds continue to enroll in and graduate from college at markedly lower rates than their more privileged peers (Aud et al., 2010).;The continued disparities in postsecondary enrollment and graduation suggest that students from traditionally undeserved college-going populations confront barriers on the path to higher education that threaten to obstruct their immediate enrollment (Jacob & Wilder Linklow, 2011; Knight & Marciano, 2013). While many studies identified mechanisms of inequality (e.g., Rosenbaum, 2001), the majority focus on individual-level indicators and obscure the effects of settings and their embedded resources on students' college access outcomes. Therefore, many questions remain regarding how settings interact with and determine students' proximal experiences as they progress through high school and towards college (Bronfenbrenner, 1979; Seidman, 2012). For example, how do settings, such as schools, influence students' college access outcomes via the provision and organization of resources? How do social processes, through the creation of norms, relationships, and roles, enable and restrict students' experiences within settings? Additionally, how do students' leverage different types of support in order to progress through the college access process successfully?;In the present dissertation, I seek to contribute to the college access literature in two ways. First, I revisit existing stage models of college choice and propose an expanded model of college access that more broadly reflects the process-oriented experiences of students from diverse backgrounds as determined by the influence of multiple settings. Second, I examine the role that social contexts play in framing the experiences of college-going students from traditionally underserved college-going populations. Specifically, I investigate the ways in which settings and their embedded resources influence the development of a college for all norm and students' experiences throughout the college access process. Additionally, I explore the impact of relational and contextual resources on educational opportunities, support structures, and, ultimately, postsecondary enrollment.