About a year and a half ago, the seventy or so students in the Freshman Inquiry classes that I'm honored to teach at Portland State University--Immigration, Migration, and Belonging--collaborated to create a Student Bill of Rights. The great majority of these students are people of color, from immigrant families, and first-generation college students, and the great majority are excited and proud to be at university. But many of them soon feel out of place and discouraged.
Here are their conclusions on what colleges should do to help them to feel at home and to succeed, just published in Amplify: A Journal of Writing-As-Activism: