Near the beginning of a new study on racial attitudes and college attainment, the authors note the story of Desiree Martinez, who attended a high school in a low-income part of Los Angeles and longed to enroll at the University of California, Los Angeles. She confided her ambitions to a teacher. The teacher frowned and said, “I don’t know why counselors push students into these schools they’re not ready for … Students only get their hearts broken when they don’t get into those schools, and the students that do get in come back as dropouts.”

Martinez, crushed, told another teacher, who encouraged her, and said she should not let people like the first teacher “hold you back.”

The discouraging teacher was white. The encouraging teacher was Latino.

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Education in the health professions has for many years included instruction on the importance of asking patients about their backgrounds and beliefs, which may relate to understanding conditions they are experiencing and inform possible treatments. But those who teach future nurses and doctors stress that background is but one characteristic of a person, and that assuming too much based on such backgrounds can be insulting and even dangerous to patients.

Best practice is not to simply offer health professions students lists of stereotypes by racial, ethnic and religious groups. So when word spread last week about a section of a nursing textbook that did just that, many were horrified. Pearson, the publisher, pledged to remove the content.

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The higher education attainment gap between Latino people in America and their white and black counterparts is widening, according to new research.

A study from Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce finds that the share of Latinos in the US who obtained at least some postsecondary education increased from 35 per cent to 45 per cent between 1992 and 2016.

But even though more Latinos are going to university, the rate of growth for white and black people during this period was even greater.

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In poor urban neighborhoods, getting not just to but through college can be a path to a brighter future. But where students enroll, and how soon after high-school graduation they start college, can markedly affect their chances of earning a degree.

A study of former Philadelphia public-school students by researchers at Drexel University found that six years after their expected high-school graduation, only one in five had earned a college certificate or degree.

But for those who started college within a semester of getting a high-school diploma, the success rate was far higher: 46 percent. Nationally about two-thirds of students who are age 20 or younger when they enter college earn a degree within six years, according to the National Student Clearinghouse.

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At a recent town-hall meeting in Tucson, local business leaders took up education in the state of Arizona. They examined state support for public colleges — among the lowest in the country — and fretted about their future work force, says Gary D. Rhoades, a professor of higher education at the University of Arizona. They had even gone to the statehouse to meet with legislators, he heard at the town hall. “If you need to raise taxes,” the businessmen had told their representatives, “we’ll give you political cover.”

To their surprise, the professor recalls, the legislators waved off their requests. One reportedly said: “Those kids don’t need college.”

In a state where 60 percent of schoolchildren are Hispanic, and the legislature is overwhelmingly white, the words “those kids” have meaning.

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As a junior at Howard University, Savannah Bowen left Washington, D.C., to study at the Sorbonne in Paris for the spring semester. Her experiences in France have since become an invaluable reference point when mapping out her career.

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The Penn Center for Minority Serving Institutions (CMSI) has released a new report that highlights the return on investment (ROI) on Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs).

The report outlines MSIs as, Asian American Native American Pacific Islander serving institutions, Alaska Native serving institutions, historically Black colleges and universities, Hispanic serving institutions, predominantly Black institutions, tribal colleges and universities, Native American serving non-tribal institutions, and Native Hawaii serving institutions.

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I have been fortunate to have had some exciting opportunities as a college student. I was invited to the White House and held internships at the National Science Foundation and at a university in New Zealand. I was even featured in a public-television show called “The Code Trip” (part of Roadtrip Nation), in which two other computer-science students and I drove an RV across the United States, visiting top professionals in our field. My secret to landing these opportunities? It was my decision, as a Native American, to attend a tribal college — first Diné College, a Navajo institution where I earned my associate degree, and then Salish Kootenai College, in Montana, where I recently graduated.

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As a social psychologist at a liberal-arts college, I try to help students recognize, and perhaps overcome, stereotyped expectations about diverse social groups. About 20 years ago, after working on a study of how amputees adjusted to their condition, I became interested in how people with disabilities — let’s call them insiders — are sometimes judged by outsiders, or nondisabled people. (Some rehabilitation professionals use those terms to emphasize that those two categories are socially constructed. Specifically, I wondered whether, and how, outsiders could come to better understand insiders’ actual experiences. A few years ago I had an opportunity to carry out some experiments aimed at helping people broaden their perspectives.

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Until last year, Ninotska Love would have been barred from attending Wellesley College. She’s an accomplished student who has persevered through hardship, but under longstanding rules, the college would have rejected her.

Now the rules have changed. This week, Love will become one of the first transgender women to attend Wellesley in the school’s 147-year history.

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