Developmental Education and Ethnic Minorities

Building on the African American civil rights movement, the ethnic minority movements of the 1960s achieved important transformations at all levels of education in the United States. In post-secondary education, one of the most important achievements was giving unprecedented numbers of ethnic minority students the opportunity to attend college. As colleges began to open their doors more broadly to ethnic minorities, both faculty and students recognized that the new students needed institutional support to make access to higher education truly meaningful. Universities and colleges responded by adapting and developing programs that previously had been created to enable the success of students returning from military service in World War II. The redesign of these so-called remedial programs to better serve ethnic minority students resulted in developmental ...