Special Issue: The Ecology of College Readiness

This monograph focuses on the main populations and topics in the college readiness literature. The population of U.S. youth who are traditionally aged high school and college students dominates research; for the most part, the authors concentrate on literature about this population. Within this broad parameter, the review is centrally concerned with the economically and educationally challenged students identified by Walpole (2007) as "low-SES [socioeconomic status], low-income, working-class, and first-generation students" (p. 14). They extend this definition by including literature that focuses on underrepresented racial and ethnic groups within this larger population. Their purpose was to map the literature onto an ecological framework that would provide an analytical tool for a new understanding of college readiness that could guide the next generation of research, policy, and practice. The monograph is organized with this generative purpose in mind. First the authors make the case for a comprehensive, theoretically driven literature review and describe their search and coding methods, they next present a full exposition of the ecological person-process-context-time model. The core of the monograph is an exposition of the literature that organizes the concepts and research findings of the field according to each nested environmental level in the theory. For each level, the authors explore the implications of the ecological approach for identifying gaps in research and increasing college readiness for economically and educationally challenged students. They conclude with a full ecological model of college readiness and an ecological agenda for the field. Contents of this monograph include: (1) Executive Summary; (2) Foreword; (3) Acknowledgments; (4) The Case for a Comprehensive Model of College Readiness; (5) The Human Ecology Framework; (6) Individual: The Attributes of College Readiness; (7) Microsystem: The Direct Experience of Students; (8) Mesosystem: A Network of Overlapping Relationships; (9) Exosystem: The Site of Systemic and Structural Changes; (10) Macrosystem: The Arena of Culture and Ideology; (11) Chronosystem: The Role of Time in College Readiness; and (12) The Ecological View of College Readiness. Name and subject indexes are included. (Contains 3 figures and 2 tables.)