ABSTRACT
The enormous amount of work that the students put into their schools, communities, and families shows us why these students are heavily recruited by the range of colleges and universities in the United States. All too often African American students have been positioned as socially, motivationally, and academically limited by their race, their communities, and their culture. In the context of formal educational spaces, student resilience is self-efficacy, developed and supported through institutional and social mechanisms, which is necessary for students to be successful, or even sustain a presence in K-12 schools and higher education. African American students are regularly described as a homogenous group, with little attention paid to the representational, structural, and political intersectionality within the group. African American high-achievers have rigorous approaches to the college search and selection stages of college choice. Students who were more financially affluent used both their parents and community organizations to visit distant and out-of-state colleges and universities.
