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620 Annals Am. Acad. Pol. & Soc. Sci. 7 (2008)

handle is hein.cow/anamacp0620 and id is 1 raw text is: INTRODUCTION Introduction By ALEJANDRO PORTES and PATRICIA FERNANDEZ- KELLY This volume originated in a series of meet- ings on the performance of minority stu- dents in college, which was convened at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in 2005. The foundation president at the time, William Bowen, had conducted a major study on the subject (Bowen and Bok 2000) and was con- cerned about the high rates of school abandon- ment among minority students and their low representation among college graduates. Bowen and foundation vice president Harriet Zuckerman brought a number of scholars to New York to discuss the problem, its determi- nants, and possible solutions. Coincidentally, we had just completed, with Ruben G. Rumbaut, the third survey of the Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study (CILS), which had followed a large sample of second-generation youth for a decade-from early adolescence into adulthood (Portes and Rumbaut 2005). The completion of that pro- ject presented a serendipitous opportunity to tackle some of the urgent issues raised by Bowen, Zuckerman, and their associates. The third CILS survey made it possible to identify a subsample of respondents brought up in conditions of severe disadvantage and, within that subsample, those who had managed to overcome barriers to enroll in college and graduate from a four-year institution by early adulthood. Those young men and women were true outliers, representing less than 1 percent of the original CILS sample. Their extraordinary achievements deserved further investigation that could cast light on factors, other than sheer luck, propelling young minority students to succeed, despite highly adverse circumstances. With a grant from the Mellon Foundation, we set out to trace and find members of that small group and their families: only fifty cases out of more than five thousand had managed to beat statistical odds. Our research took the DOI: 10.1177/0002716208322829 ANNALS, AAPSS, 620, November 2008

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