This is an ethnographic study of an inner city college spanning two decades after the institution of open admission in 1970. Its students are predominantly African-American and Hispanic, though increasing numbers come from countries throughout the developing world. These first generation college students, many of them beyond customary college age, come to school encumbered with the burdens of poverty, minority status, and inadequate early schooling. Their teachers in 1990 recall with nostalgia and anguish the metamorphosis of the college during the decades of the 1970s and the 1980s. This book deals directly with the most crucial policy issue confronting the community college today: what is to be its mission. As the latest entrant to higher education, the community college now claims one-half of all new matriculants and most minorities. An evaluation of its triumphs and failures is in order.