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The change mandate for postsecondary and tertiary institutions requires little context. In the United States, the tensions between higher education and its public demands are evident as institutions struggle to support more participants than ever before in a system with finite resources. Recent assessments of the purposes and outcomes for American higher education show ongoing concerns over achievement gaps that persist across economic, racial, ethnic and gender lines, declining civic engagement among college graduates, and overall outcomes that are primarily “private and personal rather than public and societal” (National Center for Postsecondary Improvement, 2002, p. 4).

At its core, education serves to develop individual and societal knowledge. In our increasingly diverse societies, the knowledge through educational channels also conveys norms and cultural values from respective states and nations. At the same time that educational institutions ensure their longevity and relevance through services to and support from these broader levels, they also risk elevating any one cultural “story” or perspective as “the story,” to the exclusion of other member perspectives (Van Sledright, 2008, p. 110). This frustrating dilemma has unique consequences for higher education since these institutions prioritize knowledge pursuits and often have greater similarities in their discovery and application activities across their diverse, international sector than within the specific political or social contexts that characterize their state or national locations (Enders, 2004).

Institutions of higher and tertiary education are routinely recognized for their development of human capital to foster critical discoveries and applications of knowledge that grow industries, jobs, and other stabilizers of international and national economies and productive environments. In the time between the conference proceedings that first prompted the conversations presented in this book and our present-day economic circumstances that dwindle the coffers for individual as well as global economies daily, tertiary education has undergone some important transformations.

Higher Education in a Global Society: Achieving Diversity, Equity and Excellence compiled by Allen, Bonous-Hammarth and Teranishi is a welcomed addition to the series, Advances in Education in Diverse Communities: Research, Policy and Praxis. All that was intended in the initial conceptualization of the multi-volume series is richly embodied in this single volume. We, as Americans, are often known for our insularity, as though the world and its axis begin and end in the West. Higher Education in a Global Society moves us beyond that narrow context to higher terrain, to broader intellectual conceptualization. By embracing the notion of tertiary education in its global tapestry, the volume vividly analyzes the promise and peril that often co-exist in education, in various nation states. A signal contribution of this work is that it does not conceptualize the education enterprise in a steady state, but one which is in transition as schools at all levels confront the conflicting, often contradictory demands of a global society and global economy. Even more compelling in the volume is the constituent strand of social responsibility in the discussion of not only those who advance through the tertiary system of education, but those who fail to advance through the same system. Congratulations are offered to not only the co-editors for the compilation of this fine work, but to the Rockefeller Study Center in Bellagio, Italy for their wisdom in hosting the conference venue where these papers were initially delivered. If prognostications are at all appropriate here, Higher Education in a Global Society will be read, re-read and referenced for many years to come.

Much of what we know about the status of different populations in the educational system is gained by understanding the factors that facilitate or restrict student progress in the educational pipeline. The educational pipeline as an analytic model places access to and opportunity in higher education in a larger social and institutional context and examines the steps leading to the successful completion of college as part of a larger, more complex process. Namely, it helps us to understand the process – as a whole and in stages – by which the many are reduced to a few on the path leading from the earliest years of schooling to post-college outcomes.

W.E.B. Du Bois proclaimed the colorline as the problem of the 20th century; in similar fashion, the problem of the 21st century could be characterized as the “wealth divide” or more clearly, the challenge of extreme economic disparity alongside broad socio-cultural diversity. Women-of-color scholars have used various concepts such as “the matrix of domination” (King, 1988), “intersectionality” (Collins, 1991), “borderlands” (Anzaldúa, 1987) and critical race theory (Crenshaw, 1995) to demonstrate that the “problems of the 21st century” are related to rapidly expanding diversity alongside stubbornly persistent economic inequities across race, ethnicity, gender, class, language, citizenship and nation. Extensive technological, economic, political and social changes, along with immigration, have coalesced to produce a global community of great diversity and interpenetration. Unfortunately, this global community continues to be fractured by extreme disparities in wealth, divided into “have” and “have-not” societies (Chua, 2003).

Any discussion of diversity in higher and tertiary institutions would be incomplete without connecting the conversation to the broader aims of the University. Since its European origins, the University was founded on goals to pursue knowledge and, in more recent times, to provide that knowledge to a student body representative of its community and nation (Rhodes, 2001). Educators recognize that the role of the University now and in the future takes on greater importance given the central role that knowledge plays in the new millennium. Greater demands for and application of knowledge in our society suggest the need for more inclusive learning environments, where scholars and students develop and share their intellectual resources in more efficient and timely ways.

Innovation within a bureaucratic University requires broad collaboration from all agents – those internal as well as external – to promote institutional goals for positive outcomes in novel yet compelling ways. As suggested by the preceding set of chapters, the environment, particularly the cultural values in higher education institutions, can either facilitate change outcomes to support or limit diversity efforts. The same momentum that compels agents within higher education to adopt or adjust their cultural values, also contributes to discourse within the University about intertwined goals related to curriculum, academic programs and other endeavors. Thus, postsecondary institutions with genuine goals to promote diversity will have these goals reflected in their activities and at core layers of the organization to influence institutional plans and actions.