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Walter R. Allen is Allan Murray Cartter Professor in Higher Education, Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is also distinguished professor of sociology and director of CHOICES, a longitudinal study of college attendance among African Americans and Latinos in California. Allen's research interests include higher education, race and ethnicity, family patterns, and social inequality. He has been a consultant to courts, communities, business, and government. Allen's more than 100 publications include: Towards a Brighter Tomorrow: College Barriers, Hopes and Plans of Black, Latino/a and Asian American Students in California (2009); Till Victory is Won: The African American Struggle for Higher Education in California (2009); Everyday Discrimination in a National Sample of Incoming Law Students (2008); Higher Education in a Global Society: Achieving Diversity, Equity and Excellence (2006); Enacting Diverse Learning Environments: Improving the Climate for Racial/Ethnic Diversity in Higher Education (1999); College in Black and White: African American Students in Predominantly White and Historically Black Public Universities (1991); and The Colorline and the Quality of Life in America (1989).

Beginning in 2003, Walter Allen co-convened and codirected an international consortium of scholars dedicated to examining the “Implications, Challenges and Lessons from Increased Student Diversity in Higher Education” (http://choices.gseis.ucla.edu/21stcentury/). The larger group includes 35 scholars from fourteen different nations and five continents who are concerned with diversity in higher education. For our purposes, diversity is broadly defined to encompass not only race/ethnicity but also gender, language, citizenship, social class, culture, and region as significant in each national system of status hierarchy. The inaugural meeting of the consortium was held at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center in Bellagio, Italy.

Taken in its entirety, this edited volume presents broad, sweeping perspectives on race culture, society, socialization and education. The topics are expansive and the analyses incisive. Various contributors to the volume earned doctoral degrees in education, human development, psychology, social work and sociology across four decades (1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s). Despite the variety of disciplines, theoretical perspectives, methodological approaches and conclusions, there is an underlying coherence. This coherence derives in part from the authors' shared commitment to an holistic approach, which examines questions around educational achievement in relation to ecological, cultural, historical, political, economic, social and psychological contexts. In a word, these chapters embody an holistic approach to educational research, theory, practice and policy that is very much consistent with the Chicago School Tradition.To be sure, the studies in this volume raise far more questions than provide definitive answers concerning the perplexing problems of race, culture, inequality and education in America. The central importance of these studies and this volume may reside in their very ability to challenge established orthodoxies. By doing so, the studies published here provide a vital heuristic function. Certainly, there continues to be a pressing need for concerted efforts on research, theory, teaching/learning and policy fronts in order to achieve educational equity for African Americans and for other disenfranchised groups. To the extent that this volume fuels the dialogue and continues the quest, then our purpose of honoring Professor Edgar G. Epps, consummate scholar and important contributor to the Chicago School Tradition, has been well served.

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).

This study overviews the representation of students of color at critical junctures in California's educational pipeline based on analyses of California Postsecondary Education Commission (CPEC) and the California Department of Education (CDE) data. More specifically, it examines high school completion, undergraduate and graduate attendance rates, and degree attainment for different racial/ethnic groups within California's higher education system and related state-wide statistics. In doing so, we aim to provide a critical analysis of the state's educational system and the conditions for access and success in higher education.

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.

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.