Won't Lose This Dream: How an Upstart Urban University Rewrote the Rules of a Broken System

Written by Andrew Gumbel

Narrated by Leon Nixon

Once just another unglamorous urban university, Georgia State University has become a place of miracles and wonders in the heart of Atlanta, the city that spawned the civil rights movement. GSU is a living experiment in the education of lower income students and a crucible in which the promise of social advancement through talent and hard work, the essence of the American Dream, is being rekindled in an age of deep inequality and political crisis.

More than any other institution in the country, Georgia State has overturned the assumption that poorer students are doomed to fail. Won't Lose This Dream describes how the architects of Georgia State's success harnessed the power of evolving data technologies, a "moneyball" strategy that helped them recognize and remove the obstacles that have held poor students back. Veteran journalist Andrew Gumbel uncovers the human stories behind these innovations, tracing real students as they realize lifelong dreams of graduating from college.

Today, a Georgia State freshman who arrives homeless and hungry is no less likely to succeed than the daughter of a billionaire. African American, Hispanic, and low-income students now graduate from GSU at rates equal to or higher than those of other students.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tantor Media, Inc
• Release date: Jan 26, 2021
• ISBN: 9781705274682

Andrew Gumbel

Andrew Gumbel is a British-born journalist, based in Los Angeles, who has won awards for his work as an investigative reporter, a political columnist, and a feature writer. For more than twenty years he worked as a foreign correspondent for Reuters and the British newspapers The Guardian and The Independent, covering stories in Europe, the Middle East, and the Americas. He covered the first democratic elections in East Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall and has frequently reported on contested or suspect elections since in Bosnia, Serbia, Albania, Haiti, and, since 2000, in the United States. He is the author of Down for the Count and Won’t Lose This Dream and the co-editor (with David W. Orr, William S. Becker, and Bakari Kitwana) of Democracy Unchained, all from The New Press, and the author of Oklahoma City.