Building Fortresses Through the Cracks: How Racially and Economically Minoritized Students Navigate Through College

While college enrollment overall has declined over the past decade, students from racially and economically minoritized backgrounds and first-generation students have been attending postsecondary education in increased numbers (Duffy et al., 2023; Garriott, 2020; National Center for Education Statistics, 2023). These students face many obstacles in their journeys to and through college, including encounters with race- and class-based deficit discourses and gaps between institutional structures and their unique internal resources and needs (Devlin, 2013; Duffy et al., 2023; McKay & Devlin, 2016; Yosso, 2005). Through a Community Cultural Wealth framework (Yosso, 2005), a series of sedentary and walking semistructured interviews, and a constructivist grounded theory analysis (Charmaz, 2006, 2017), this project identifies strategies that ten diverse economically marginalized college students developed and implemented to navigate through their university. It also proposes institutional bridges to affirm and foster the cultural wealth of minoritized students.