First Generation/Student Success: Fondren Library Resources and Support: Home

An intimate, powerful, and inspiring memoir by the former First Lady of the United States In a life filled with meaning and accomplishment, Michelle Obama has emerged as one of the most iconic and compelling women of our era.

As a child in small-town Oklahoma, Elizabeth Warren yearned to go to college and then become an elementary school teacher--an ambitious goal, given her family's modest means. Finally, at age 62, she decided to run for elective office and won the most competitive--and watched--Senate race in the country.

The first Hispanic and third woman appointed to the United States Supreme Court, Sonia Sotomayor has become an instant American icon. Now, with a candor and intimacy never undertaken by a sitting Justice, she recounts her life from a Bronx housing project to the federal bench, a journey that offers an inspiring testament to her own extraordinary determination and the power of believing in oneself.

Colin Powell, one of America's most admired public figures, reveals the principles that have shaped his life and career in this inspiring and engrossing memoir.

Getting in is only half the battle. The Privileged Poor reveals how--and why--disadvantaged students struggle at elite colleges, and explains what schools can do differently if these students are to thrive.

"A concise, manageable, lucid summary of the best scholarship, practices, and future-oriented thinking about how to effectively recruit, educate, develop, retain, and ultimately graduate first-generation students." --from the foreword by John N. Gardner

This book examines the university experiences of first-in-family university students, and how these students' decisions to return to education impact upon their family members and significant others.

Why do we feel uncomfortable talking about class? Why is it taboo? Why do people often address class through coded terminology like trashy, classy, and snobby? How does discriminatory language, or how do conscious or unconscious derogatory attitudes, or the anticipation of such behaviors, impact those from poor and working class backgrounds when they straddle class? Through 26 narratives of individuals from poor and working class backgrounds - ranging from students, to multiple levels of administrators and faculty, both tenured and non-tenured - this book provides a vivid understanding of how people can experience and straddle class in the middle, upper, or even elitist class contexts of the academy.

A former Wall Street quant sounds an alarm on the mathematical models that pervade modern life and threaten to rip apart our social fabric. We live in the age of the algorithm. Increasingly, the decisions that affect our lives--where we go to school, whether we get a car loan, how much we pay for health insurance--are being made not by humans, but by mathematical models. In theory, this should lead to greater fairness: Everyone is judged according to the same rules, and bias is eliminated. But as Cathy O'Neil reveals in this urgent and necessary book, the opposite is true. The models being used today are opaque, unregulated, and uncontestable, even when they're wrong. Most troubling, they reinforce discrimination: If a poor student can't get a loan because a lending model deems him too risky (by virtue of his zip code), he's then cut off from the kind of education that could pull him out of poverty, and a vicious spiral ensues. Models are propping up the lucky and punishing the downtrodden, creating a "toxic cocktail for democracy." Welcome to the dark side of Big Data. Tracing the arc of a person's life, O'Neil exposes the black box models that shape our future, both as individuals and as a society. These "weapons of math destruction" score teachers and students, sort résumés, grant (or deny) loans, evaluate workers, target voters, set parole, and monitor our health. O'Neil calls on modelers to take more responsibility for their algorithms and on policy makers to regulate their use. But in the end, it's up to us to become more savvy about the models that govern our lives. This important book empowers us to ask the tough questions, uncover the truth, and demand change.