Getting In: Mexican Americans' Perceptions of University Attendance and the Implications for Freshman Year Persistence.
In view of its importance for social advancement [1 1] and its contribution to the improvement of personal well-being [2, 5 1], it is not surprising that higher education in the United States has become a cynosure for efforts to improve the condition of economically and socially disadvantaged subpopulations. Ironically, the present condition of these subpopulations exists because, in the past, higher education's service as an instrument for social mobility was seldom indiscriminate. America's racial and ethnic minorities have been and continue to be "grossly underrepresented in higher education and in almost all occupational fields that require a college education" [2], and do not, as a consequence, enjoy equitable participation in the larger society's social, economic, and political life. One racial minority that has been particularly underserved by American higher education, in general, and by the four-year institution, in particular, is the Mexican American. In 1979, according to an estimate by the Bureau of the Census [47], the rate of baccalaureate degree attainment in the general population was more than four times the rate in the Mexican American subpopulation alone. Data presented by Brown [10] tend to confirm the link between social and economic ad-