Situating the Community College in Theories of Social Reproduction, Cultural Capital, Cultural Reproduction, Critical Multiculturalism and CRT

By Oscar Medina

In California, the few working-class first-generation Chicana/os who pursue higher education do so through the community college system (De los Santos, 2006; Huber, 2006; Ornelas & Solorzano, 2004a). Though community colleges claim that one of their primary functions is to prepare students for bachelor degrees, studies show that a low proportion of minority students transfer to a four-year bachelor granting institution (Grubb, 1991; Ornelas & Solorzano, 2004b; Rendon & Valadez, 1993; Sengupta & Jepsen, 2006). How is the community college working to reduce structural race, class and gender inequality in higher education? The goal of this paper is to present theories that inform my working research questions. The community college and its student body are discussed through these theoretical lenses: social reproduction, cultural capital, cultural reproduction, critical multiculturalism, and critical race theory. This paper focuses on the ways in which scholars use these theories to examine the social and cultural organization of the community college and student experiences with the institution. The questions below guide this literature review:
1) How do Chicana/os navigate and negotiate the community college system in pursuit of transfer to a four-year institution?
2) What are their experiences in the community college transfer process?
The Community College: Back Then and Now
Although community colleges provide opportunities for students to transfer to four-year institutions, policy reports continue to emphasize the theme that the role of community colleges is to produce skilled-workers for the capitalist economy (Lizardo et al., 2007; Sengupta & Jepsen, 2006). Several scholars and policy makers articulate the varied missions of the community college, including two popular missions— the liberal arts transfer course preparation program and the vocational job training program. Historically, community colleges were small liberal art institutions that prepared students with two-years of liberal art studies to transfer to a senior college or university (Brint & Karabel, 1989). According to Brint and Karabel (1989), the vocational movement of two-year institutions came after World War II when thousands of veterans returned to the States and the U.S. was unprepared to take such a large pool of veterans into the labor market. Under the G.I. Bill of 1944, veterans flooded the higher education system, calling for the need to construct more two-year institutions with an undertone for more vocational training programs. Brint and Karabel write that students favored maintaining transfer programs while junior college administrators favored vocationalizing the two-year college. Alternately termed two-year institutions, junior colleges, and community colleges, these institutions of higher education continue to serve large constituents of low-income and minority groups.
A more contemporary scholar on community colleges, Levin (2001) highlights how the community colleges' educational purposes have moved from placing their emphasis on education to occupational training, from social needs to business and industry desires. Levin claims that the community colleges have lost sight of their social role and turned increasingly toward economic interests. He argues that the emphasis on inclusiveness and multiculturalism at community colleges belies an underlying capitalist agenda. He provides examples of the way two year institutions operate and are organized in an efficient way that is focused on profit. Levin posits that globalization has shifted the community college from its transfer function to a vocational function. The changes according to Levin are the consequences of forces such as the global economy, the impact of immigration, and increased communication systems. Levin claims that these forces are mediated by state policies and therefore contribute to the establishment of an institution that reflects the globalizing process in its organizational actions.
Nonetheless, his work also explains how community colleges respond to immigrant student enrollment in a way that stresses job training. His major claim is that community colleges are becoming firmly implanted as the producers of skilled workers through a highly prioritized vocational institution that has abandoned its role as an educational institution that once emphasized the opportunity to transfer to four-year institutions. His work offers a light critique of global capitalism that fails to offer a comprehensive analysis of the cultural and political ideologies that fuel global capitalism and migration. Like Brint and Karabel, Levin places an emphasis on community college administrators who pursue opportunities to capitalize on changing economic conditions that push occupational training rather than liberal art transfer programs.

SOCIAL REPRODUCTION AND THE ROLE OF COMMUNITY COLLEGE

Theories of social reproduction suggest that schools (including colleges) are sites that sustain the socioeconomic inequalities in the capitalist structure. The Marxist structuralists approach emphasizes the community college structure and the ways in which the college systemically track and sort students into non-academic vocational programs, academic transfer programs, or lead them to opt out of higher education all together.
Clark (1960) develops and justifies the “cooling out” concept in the community college. Clark posits that there are three types of community college students, pure terminal (vocational students), pure transfer (four-year institution track) and latent terminal student (the ‘cooling out’ student). The latent terminal student is the student that threatens the conventional ideology of community college and must be “cooled out.” This latent terminal student is a student who would like to transfer but is not likely to meet the academic qualifications to transfer. According to Clark, the “cooling out” process is a system that serves to remove students from the institution by placing the blame of their low academic performance on the individual student rather than the institution. Clark’s three-type student model justifies a system where a group must be “cooled out.” The “cooling out” of the latent terminal student serves to legitimize unequal outcomes and legitimizes the removal of the “problem” to sustain a bureaucratic institution of “equal educational opportunity.”
Karabel (1977) provides a Marxist structuralist critique of the community college. His critique specifically argues against Clark’s perception of the community college and his three-type student model. Karabel contends that community colleges, considered by many to be democratic and egalitarian institutions, track and sort poor working-class students into vocational and occupational programs rather than guide them into academic transfer programs. “The community college” according to Karabel, “lies at the base of the stratification structure of higher education both in the class origins of its students and in their occupational destinations” (p.246). Karabel further posits that the socioeconomic position of the community college illustrates how policy planning, for the community college, is made by an elite ruling class that pushes for more occupational education and vocational training that serve to reproduce class inequality (Karabel, 1977; Karabel & Halsey, 1977).
Most critical research on the social position of the community college is viewed through structuralism. Structuralists illustrate and critique how the community college contributes to the maintenance and reproduction of class inequality. Their critique is one that views the problems of inequality and unequal opportunity as a result of an oppressive capitalist system. Employing organizational theory and the ideological myth of meritocracy, scholars like Clark support the idea that community colleges work for those who find their place in the community college system, either in a vocational or transfer programs and those who don’t are systemically pushed out the institution. In Clark’s capitalist and organizational analysis of the community college he enables a system that pathologize the latent terminal student so that the community college can continue to market its open enrollment policy. Clark’s interpretation manages to cover up the institutional failure of the community college. Structuralists critiques of Clark and the community college provide a useful lens to understand how institutions reproduce society along class lines.
Neo-Marxists like Bowles and Gintis (1976) posit that within the capitalist system, schools reproduce economic inequality through the correspondence between school and work structures. Their argument suggests that schools do not pursue the goal of social equality because they operate to meet the needs of the capitalist labor market. A critique of correspondence theory by Leonardo (2004) suggests that their work is a form of structural functionalism because although they are critical of capitalism, they believe that schools serve a predetermined social function along class lines. Bowles and Gintis’ analysis reduces racial groups and race relations to class relations in the U.S. capitalist system. In sum, while structural analyses effectively highlight the general failure of community colleges to abet social mobility, they fail to examine the lived experiences and interactions that make up the culture of these institutions.

CULTURAL CAPITAL

Working from a neo-Marxist terrain and away from economic reductionism , Pierre Bourdieu (1997) explains three forms of capital: economic, social, and cultural. Bourdieu begins by defining capital as “accumulated labor, which when appropriated on a private, i.e., exclusive, basis by agents or groups of agents, enables them to appropriate social energy in the form of reified or living labor” (p.47). Like Marx, Bourdieu interprets capital to explain the way people make meaning of their lives through economic and social relationships. Bourdieu’s approach to capital differs in his claim that social relationships must work to create capital. Capital exists under certain material conditions that make something valuable. Capital in Bourdieu’s view is value that exists in social relationships. Marx argued that profit came from the bourgeoisie’s overvaluation of commodities over the value of the labor that went into the production of commodity. The exchange value of commodities is not the same as Bourdieu’s capital, which refers to the social relationships that appropriate value to commodities. Bourdieu’s use of capital implies social relationships. In other words, Marx discusses capital as a form of monetary value while Bourdieu talks about capital as a set of social relationships that appropriate value. The appropriation happens by a selective group who organizes capital, including its value and meaning, at a collective level.
Rather than making an economically mechanistic and deterministic explanation for unequal academic achievement among children in France, Bourdieu (1997) develops the concept of cultural capital and its three interlinked forms: the embodied state, objectified state, and institutionalized state. The embodied state of cultural capital revolves around the family, which provides a form of long lasting dispositions of the mind and body. An embodied state of cultural capital, for example, is to condition a child (ideologically) that her or his family members belong to a royal society. “The accumulation of the cultural capital in the embodied state,” according to Bourdieu, is “a process of embodiment, incorporation [that] implies a labor of inculcation, assimilation, [it] cost time, time which must be invested personally by the investor” (p.47). In other words, cultural capital consists of a laborious process by a groups “social energy” that appropriates value. It is in the embodied state that cultural capital is accumulated over a period of socialization. Bourdieu further posits that the transmission of cultural capital is “the best hidden form of hereditary transmission of capital” (p.49). The objectified state of cultural capital exists in the form of cultural goods such as a picture or book archive of a family’s membership to a royal society. Lastly, the institutionalized state includes the school and its value and reward system. In the institutionalized state of cultural capital, schools value and promote the dominant cultural capital.
Bourdieu’s cultural capital cannot be discussed in isolation; it must be discussed in relationship with social and economic capital. The value of material and ideological taste happens through social relationships. In Bordieu’s lens, capital is inherently social and economical. The different forms of cultural capital suggest that cultural capital happens before the schooling process. Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital is often simplified. Cultural capital is commonly used to articulate a set of cultural knowledge, skills, norms, and linguistic codes that students bring with them to the school without an actual reference to its social and economic relations.
The accumulation of cultural capital is an informal process that begins before schooling. Also, cultural capital takes time to accumulate. Nonetheless, cultural capital “cannot be accumulated beyond the appropriating capacities of an individual agent; it declines and dies with its bearer” (p.49). Cultural capital is not transmittable; people work (social energy) in the social and economic material conditions to make, rather than transmit, cultural capital.

CULTURAL CAPITAL AND COMMUNITY COLLEGE

Trujillo and Diaz (1999) provide an example of how one urban community college in San Antonio, Texas recognizes cultural differences and actively seeks to incorporate the cultural capital of nontraditional students through its formal pedagogical and informal curricular practices. The authors claim that this process consists of the acknowledgement of students’ cultural diversity and their educational needs. It should be noted that grassroots community activists, who strongly advocated that the institution prioritize a liberal arts transfer education program, founded this college. Trujillo and Diaz argue that faculty and staff recognize and value the cultural capital of student and community culture. Because faculty and staff acknowledge students' cultural capital and the community's culture, students develop networks that facilitate communication and social trust, which in turn lead to collective benefits and academic triumph in transfer success. Students build social networks through formal curriculum and cultural accommodations (e.g. faculty-initiated pedagogy) that make classroom material relevant to students and collaborative learning activities. Student activities, support services, and the college’s link to the local community further engage students in building social networks that formulate social capital – all of which eventually facilitate the transfer to a four-year institution (Trujillo & Diaz, 1999).
Also using Bourdieu's concept of cultural capital, Valadez (1993) writes that community colleges utilize particular linguistic structures, authority patterns, and types of curricula that are familiar to students from higher socioeconomic backgrounds. Valadez uses cultural capital to explain how community college students have to make informed academic decisions that guide them through the community college system. Valadez posits that the community college arrangements and practices act as detriments to the academic achievement and upward social mobility of nontraditional students rather than helping them get through a unfamiliar system.

CULTURAL REPRODUCTION

Schools play a pivotal role in legitimating and reproducing the cultural capital of the dominant classes (Bourdieu, 1977). Bourdieu argues that the educational system reproduces the structure of distribution of cultural capital among social classes because the culture, practices, and value systems it embraces is closest to the dominant culture. Working from a similar Marxist and Bourdieun terrain at the social and cultural level, Willis (1977) writes how students participate in their own reproduction of society. Although his analysis comes from a structuralist tradition, his explanations of why working class “lads” get working class jobs is infused by a cultural interpretation of the reproduction of society. Willis’ book adds culture – human agency — to supplement his explanation of why working class “lads” get working class jobs. He claims that these working class “lads” reproduce their social and economic conditions.
Using Willis’s work to create his framework for looking at why a group of poor women enter a work preparation program at the community college, Valadez (1999) examines their process of making life decisions. He describes the ways in which the instructors, the community college, and the local employers all interact to create the conditions that sustain a work preparation program that sends students toward low-level, short-term, dead-end jobs. Valadez also shows how these women’s choices are limited by what the institutions provide for them, and how their ideas are shaped by instructors, their families, and the economic conditions of the community. The study reveals the way in which community college women make decisions to go into particular lines of work. The study recognizes that these women are active in determining their own fate, but their perceptions of reality and choices are forged by a variety of institutional, social, and cultural factors.
Bourdiue’s concept of cultural capital and social and cultural reproduction challenges meritocratic notions of schooling. Bourdieu’s theory is useful to explain unequal academic achievement that exist among upper-middle class and working class groups. These inequalities are reproduced because one group has institutional advantage that others do not. However, this structural and constructivist theory fails to acknowledge that educational institutions operate not only along dominant class and cultural preference but also on race preference. For example, Leonardo (2004) posits that Bourdieuan analysis of schooling would benefit from an integration of the race concept because race and class are inextricably linked to student academic achievement.

CRITICAL MULTICULTURALISM IN COMMUNITY COLLEGE

Working from a theoretical framework of feminism, critical theory and postmodernism, Rhoads and Valadez (1996) scrutinize the community college and develop three concepts: critical multiculturalism, border knowledge, and politics of identity. In doing so, they argue that community colleges should adopt critical multiculturalism in contrast to conventional multiculturalism. Rather than multiculturalism, which typically celebrates cultural differences by offering courses that expose students to a wide variety of cultures and worldviews, critical multiculturalism “seeks to transform educational institutions from monolithic centers of power to democratic constellations in which organizational structures reflect diverse cultures and perspectives” (p.9). Rhoads’ and Valadez’s definition of critical multiculturalism comes from post-structuralists Benismon (1994) and McLaren (1995), who write that critical multicultural praxis “understands representations of race, class and gender as being the result of larger social struggles over signs of meanings, … [that] stress the central task of transforming, social, cultural and institutional relations in which meanings are generated” (Roads & Valadez, 1996). As critical multiculturalists, Rhoads and Valadez posit that the idea of a common culture and a common body of knowledge promotes the colonization of culturally diverse peoples and the suppression of their cultural identities. They contend that a common culture or body of knowledge “leads to cultural hierarchies contained in notions of the privileged and the deprived, the insider and the outsider, the dominant and the subjugated” (p.19). Institutions such as the community college continue to acknowledge a common culture or body of knowledge, usually of the white middle class and exclude the non-white working class culture and knowledge.
Rhoads’ and Valadez’s critical multiculturalists perspective develops the concept of border knowledge, “knowledge that resides outside the canon, outside the cultural mainstream” (p.7). They argue that border knowledge is a form of cultural capital unworthy of exchange in mainstream educational institutions. Border knowledge is in relationship with cultural production because “all forms of cultural production exist within social relations framed by power” (p.23). Finally, Rhoads and Valadez assert “the politics of identity moves beyond understanding how forms of cultural production have named and situated otherness. The politics of identity both interrogates the intent behind representations and attempts to create newer self-representations” (p.24). To make this claim, the authors place agency as a crucial element to engage with the politics of identity. Within the context of community college, Rhoads and Valadez successfully critique the culture of the community college and provide an alternative vision for the community college. They conclude by proposing that the community college must take on two important roles as an institution: 1) It should take on an organizational multiplicity (multiple identities) that dismantles an authoritarian view of knowledge and pedagogy and 2) it should embrace multiple forms of cultural knowledge—border knowledge—that the community college can use to exhibit more features of a democratic institution. Indeed, their argument presents a challenge to the conventional ideologies, practices, and norms that shape the culture and organization of the community college today.

CRITICAL RACE THEORY (CRT)

Recently employing critical race theory (CRT) some scholars have taken a leap into examining the institutional racism in community college (Ornelas, 2002; Solórzano et al., 2005). There are five tenets to CRT in higher education that Solorzano (1998) claims 1) the centrality and intersections of race and racism with race, class, and gender, 2) the challenge to dominant ideology, 3) the commitment to social justice, 4) the centrality of experiential knowledge, and 5) the interdisciplinary perspective. CRT explores the ways in which “race-neutral” laws and institutional structures, practices, and policies in higher education perpetuate racial inequality in education. CRT challenges dominant liberal ideas of color blindness and meritocracy and attempts to illustrate how these ideas operate to disadvantage people of color while giving further advantage to whites. CRT in higher education considers how race and racism are woven into structures, practices, discourses and policies that inhibit the success of students of color. One recent study using CRT (Solórzano et al., 2005) examined the conditions of Chicana/os in higher education in the U.S. The study found how racialized structures, policies, and practices influence the educational attainment and academic progress of Chicana/os.

CRT AND COMMUNITY COLLEGE

Using CRT Ornelas’ (2002) dissertation examines the institutional available resources and barriers that Latina/o students experience in the community college transfer process. Ornelas’ work examined the role of race as it informs the transfer function and process to a four-year institution. By decoding the voices of community college students, counselors, faculty and administrators, she found that Latina/o students faced institutionalized racism that constrained them from transferring to four-year institutions.
CRT AND CULTURAL CAPITAL

Through CRT, Yosso (2005) has critiqued Bourdieu’s theory of cultural capital accusing it of continuing to impose a deficit thinking model on poor working class students of color. She asserts:
While Bourdieu's work sought to provide a structural critique of social and cultural reproduction, his theory of cultural capital has been used to assert that some communities are culturally wealthy while others are culturally poor.
This interpretation of Bourdieu exposes White, middle class culture as the standard, and therefore all other forms and expressions of 'culture' are judged in comparison to this 'norm.' In other words, cultural capital is not just inherited or possessed by middle class, but rather it refers to an accumulation of specific forms of knowledge skills and abilities that are valued by privileged groups of society (p.76).

Yosso fails to mention the scholars that have interpret Bourdieu’s work as white middle class being the standard. Bourdiue’s work of cultural capital attempts to highlight how white middle class values, knowledge, and language are institutionalized, thus granting those who posses the white middle class values, knowledge and language are at an institutional advantage. Never does Bourdieu literally mention that white middle class is the standard that poor working class communities of color must meet. Bourdieu argued that the knowledge of the upper middle classes are valued by educational institutions.

CONCLUSION

In the 1970’s scholars problematized the community college using Marxist structuralist analysis that located capitalism and notions of meritocratic schooling as the central problem. These Marxist arguments highlighted how the community colleges sorted students based on class status. Students from working class background were commonly sorted into vocational programs where instructors and curriculum trained them to be efficient and obedient workers (Brint & Karabel, 1989; Karabel, 1977). Students from middle or upper class background were sorted into transfer programs, where instructors and curriculum stressed critical thinking skills and leadership training. These structural analyses were criticized for being too economically deterministic and mechanistic. Marxist analysis failed to acknowledge agency and cultural differences. Nonetheless, culture, race and gender were subordinate factors in Marxist structural analysis of community colleges.
Bourdiue demonstrates how cultural capital is produced, reproduced and maintained through accumulated labor of social energy accord with the social and economic material conditions. Cultural capital is working knowledge, skills, and language that serve as tools for navigation. Educational institutions reward and value the dominant cultural capital. The educational structures, in this case the community colleges, serve to reward the cultural capital of the dominant class—white middle-upper class. Bourdiue’s theory allows us to understand how school-based relationships and organizational structures work to the advantage of the white middle-upper class students. On the flip side, Trujillo and Diaz (1999) illustrate how the faculty and staff at one community college valued the cultural capital that Chicano and Mexican immigrant students brought to the campus. Through curriculum and cultural accommodation by faculty-initiated pedagogy, Chicano and Mexican immigrant students built trusting social networks with faculty and peers that facilitated transfer to a four-year college.
Willis’ work of cultural production interprets the way people reproduce their social and economic conditions based on their perceptions shaped on social, economic and cultural factors. This is different than Bourdiue’s structural model of social and cultural reproduction. Bourdiue’s concept of social and cultural capital combines theory and empirical data to explain the differences of educational achievements in France (Bourdieu, 1977). His theory of cultural capital is widely used in higher education research but often misinterpreted. Bourdieu examines the notion of cultural capital within schools and concludes that schools are sites that privilege the culture of the dominant class at the expense of marginalizing the culture of the subordinate class. His theory of cultural capital can be used to explain how white middle-class college students in the U.S. systemically out perform students of color because the institutional values, practices and norms work to their advantage.
Last but not least using critical multiculturalism to examine the community colleges Rhoads and Valadez (1996), bring insight to the importance of using feminist theory, critical theory, postmodern theory and cultural theory to inform their argument that challenges the dominant organizational and student culture in the community college by institutionalizing critical multiculturalism, border knowledge, and politics of identity. Critical multiculturalism seeks to transform educational institutions and change organizational structures that reflect diverse cultures and perspectives. Border knowledge, knowledge that resides outside the canon, should be equally valued within the community college. Politics of identity is where cultural production and agency are central elements that interrogate mainstream representations of race, class, gender and sexual orientation to create new self-representations. By using ethnographic and case study methods, supplemented with theory, Rhoads and Valadez (1996) uncover the lived experiences of students and faculty in the community college setting that add important detail that go beyond the traditional kinds of structural analysis of community colleges (Brint & Karabel, 1989; Karabel, 1977).
Critical race theory commits to challenging explicit white supremacist institutional structures, practices and norms in higher education. Unlike structuralist or social and cultural reproduction models, CRT intersects race, class, gender and other forms of oppression to understand the “colored” experience (Solórzano, 1998). Nonetheless, the other principals of CRT—the challenge to dominant ideology, the commitment to social justice, the centrality of experiential knowledge, and the interdisciplinary perspectives—allow researchers to weave framework and methodologies that move away from traditional research frameworks and methodologies. For example through CRT’s value of centrality of experiential knowledge, Ornelas allows Latina/o community college student’s voices to be the primary sources guiding her study. She argues that Latina/o student narratives are a valid approach to research because research according to her “must not simply be an academic interpretation” (p.26).
These theories allow one to see how people make meaning of the social structures and institutions they navigate on the daily basis. Particularly, they provide insight to the formal and informal way we analyze, interpret, and critique educational institutions, social and racial structures. These theories and concepts allow us to go beyond simple explanations of students’ experiences by offering complex and different lenses interpret representations of institutional structures and student experiences in community college. I end with a quote that gives light to a research approach that I hope to model in pursuit of my research questions.

“A critical analysis of the community college culture calls for a qualitative approach that brings researchers closer to their subjects, allowing them to explore the complexities and nuances of truth, meaning and understanding” (p.195) – Laura I. Rendone in
Community Colleges As Cultural Texts: Qualitative Explorations of Organizational and Student Culture (Shaw et al., 1999).

This quote best illuminates the next step question. How do approach documenting how people experience the community system? What coupled methods, tools and theories can we use to let the voiceless speak?

WORK CITED
Bensimon, E. (Ed.). (1994). Multicultural teaching and learning. . University Park: National Center on Postsecondary Teaching, Learning, & Assesment.

Bourdieu, P. (1977). Cultural reproduction and social reproduction. In J. Karabel & A. H. Halsey (Eds.), Power and ideology in education. New York: Oxford University Press.

Bourdieu, P. (1997). The forms of capital. In A. H. Halsey, H. Lauder, P. Brown & A. S. Wells (Eds.), Education, culture, economy, and society. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

Bowles, S., & Gintis, H. (1976). Schooling in capitalist america: Educational reform and the contradictions of ecnonomic life. New York: Basic books/Harper.

Brint, S., & Karabel, J. (1989). The diverted dream: Community colleges and the promise of educational opportunity in america, 1900-1985. New York: Oxford University Press.

Clark, B. R. (1960). The open door college: A case study. New York: McGraw Hill.

De los Santos, A. G., De Los Santos, G.E. (2006). Latina/os and community colleges. In A. M.
G. Jeanett Castellanos, Mark Kamimura (Ed.), The latina/o pathway to the ph.D.: Abriendo caminos (pp. 37-53). Sterling, Virginia: Stylus Publishing.

Grubb, N. (1991). The decline of community college transfer rates: Evidence from national longitudinal surveys. Journal of Higher Education, 62(2), 194-222.

Huber, L. P., Huidor, O., Malgón, M.C., Sanchez, G., Solorzano, D.G. (2006). Falling through the cracks: Critical transitions in the latina/o educational pipeline. UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center(7), 1-13.

Karabel, J. (1977). Community colleges and social stratification: Submerged class conflict in american higher education. In J. Karabel & A. H. Halsey (Eds.), Power and ideology in education (pp. 232-254). New York: Oxford University Press.

Karabel, J., & Halsey, A. H. (1977). Power and ideology. New York: Oxford University Press.

Leonardo, Z. (2004). The unhappy marriage between marxism and race critique: Political economy and the production of racialized knowledge. Policy Futures in Education, 2(3 & 4), 483-493.

Levin, J. S. (2001). Globalizing the community college: Strategies for change in the twenty-first century. New York: Palgrave.

Lizardo, R., MacMillan, J., Olsen, L., Stanley, B., Valenzuela-Vergara, I., & Bhattacharya, J. (2007). California community colleges struggle to meet the challenges of the state's underprepared workforce (Policy Brief). Oakland: California Tomorrow.

McLaren, P. (1995). Critical pedagogy and predatory culture. New York: Routledge.

Ornelas, A. (2002). An examination of the resources and barriers in the transfer process for latina/o community college students: A case study analysis of an urban community college. Unpublished Dissertation, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles.

Ornelas, A., & Solorzano, D. G. (2004a). Transfer conditions of latina/o community college students: A single institution case study. Community College Journal of Research and Practice, 28(3), 233-248.

Ornelas, A., & Solorzano, D. G. (2004b). Transfer conditions of latina/o community college stuents: A single institution case study. Community College Journal of Research and Practice, 28(3), 233-248.

Rendon, L. I., & Valadez, J. R. (1993). Qualitative indicators of hispanic student transfer. Community College Review, 20(27), 27-37.

Roads, R. A., & Valadez, J. R. (1996). Democracy, multiculturalism and the community college: A critical perspective. New York & London: Garland Publishing, Inc.

Sengupta, R., & Jepsen, C. (2006). California's college college students. San Francisco: Public Policy Institute of California.

Shaw, K. M., Valadez, J. R., & Rhoads, R. A. (Eds.). (1999). Community colleges as cultural texts: Qualitative explorations of organizational and student culture. Albany State University of New York Press.

Solórzano, D. G. (1998). Critical race theory, race and gender microaggressions, and the experience of chicana and chicano scholars. Qualitative Studies in Education, 11(1), 121-136.

Solórzano, D. G., Villapando, O., & Oseguera, L. (2005). Educational inequities and latina/o undergraduate students in the united states: A critical race analysis of their educational progress. Journal of Hispanic Higher Education, 4(3), 272-294.

Trujillo, A., & Diaz, E. (1999). "Be a name, not a number": The role of cultural and social capital in the transfer process. In K. M. Shaw, J. R. Valadez & R. A. Rhoads (Eds.), Community college as cultural texts: Qualitative explorations of organizational and student culture Albany: State University of New York Press.

Valadez, J. (1993). Cultural capital and its impact on the aspirations of nontraditional community college students. Community College Review, 21(3), 30-43.

Valadez, J. R. (1999). Preparing for work in a post-indusrial world: Resistance and compliance to the ideological messages of a community college. In K. M. Shaw, J. R. Valadez & R. A.

Rhoads (Eds.), Community college as cultural texts: Qualitative explorations of organizational and student culture (pp. 125-151). Albay: State University of New York Press.

Willis, P. (1977). Learning to labor: How working class kids get working class jobs. New York: Columbia University Press.

Yosso, T. J. (2005). Wose culture has capital? A critical race theory discussion of community cultural wealth. Race Ethnicity and Education, 8(1), 69-91.