"This Is Only The Beginning": An Exploration of Community Cultural Wealth, Racialized Experiences, and Graduate Degree Aspirations Among Black Students

Though studied extensively, much of the current literature on marginalized student experiences in higher education is presented through a deficit framing, where no known study has thoroughly investigated the influence of cultural wealth, racialized experiences, and racialized emotions on graduate degree aspirations. Guided by Carter's (2002) theoretical model of college students’ degree aspirations and Yosso's (2005) community cultural wealth model, this study’s approach to investigating Black college student experiences used a convergent parallel mixed methods design to investigate how context shapes perceptions of their campus environment and how background characteristics, cultural wealth, and racialized emotions influence their graduate degree aspirations.

Through the convergence of the quantitative and qualitative findings, the results from this mixed-methods study suggest that 1) Black students’ community cultural wealth (i.e., social, familial, resistance, and navigational capital) when drawn upon and successfully exchanged within their campus environments, positively influences graduate degree aspirations, 2) Black students’ racialized campus experiences and emotions, both positive in the form of support from faculty and other social networks, and negative in the form of experiences with racism and microaggressive behavior, influence Black student’s desires to pursue education beyond the baccalaureate, and 3) Black students’ experiences and expressions of Black joy served as a coping mechanism, a significant source resilience amidst adversity, and fostered academic persistence evidenced through its influence on Black students’ aspirations for graduate study.