Speaking Out: Underrepresented Students Challenging the Inequities of College Access

The Elon Academy is a non-profit college access and success program hosted at Elon University in Alamance County, North Carolina. It recruits academically-promising high school students with financial need and/or no family history of college in their ninth grade year and offers an intensive multi-year support program. From October 2010 to September 2011, a group of students in the program volunteered for a complex participatory research project examining college access issues in their home county. Acting as both participants and co-researchers, the team spent countless hours training, researching, analyzing, and writing to produce this manuscript. This book is a call to awareness and action for their local community and for communities nationwide that face the hardships of poverty and marginalization. It captures their perspectives on the challenges they face on the road to a college education.