This study explored the perceptions of students at an urban community college as they prepared for transfer to university. I interviewed four students, Latinas enrolled in teacher education programs, three times each for approximately one hour each. The first interviews were conducted while students were enrolled at Jane Addams College, a pseudonym for an ethnically diverse community college in a large Midwestern city. Follow-up interviews were conducted with the students over the course of one year, in 2006 and 2007. Interviews were conducted in two cases following the students from the community college through transfer to universities, in one case following the student as she continued to study at the community college, and in one case following the student through a period in which she had stopped out of college.

The title of this dissertation is a paraphrase of something a participant said: “There's a lot that I need to learn.... I'm still, in a way, learning as I go—I don't like that.” This frustration with learning the rules of the game while the game was in progress was common across the study participants, and their progress was complicated by their struggles to figure out the system as they were trying to navigate it. These students described in substantial depth a phenomenon I named “college literacy.” College literacy encompasses students' knowledge of the system and their understanding of the consequences of their decisions, including knowing what they need to decide, knowing what the decision options are, and understanding when they need to make decisions to have the optimal experience in college. College literacy is a form of capital, part of the students' cultural capital.

The students' college literacy was insufficient when they began studying at community college, whether that happened right after high school, after they left a university, or after they had been away from formal education, and their understanding of college continued to unfold, often through frustrating trial and error experiences. Understanding the college literacy students bring to community college and their experiences developing enhanced college literacy while in college has implications for research and practice.