Student success efforts often focus on issues related to students' college-readiness, but the authors of a recent book, "Becoming a Student-Ready College: A New Culture of Leadership for Student Success," challenge higher education professionals to take a different approach. The admission of increasingly greater numbers of students from groups traditionally underserved by higher education underscores the urgency of this call to refocus on the readiness of the college or university, rather than on the readiness of the student. In response to the call to remake our institutions as student-ready colleges, this article focuses on three particularly egregious challenges that must be confronted and overcome if equity gaps affecting underserved students are to be closed: (1) the challenge of implicit bias; (2) the challenge of student poverty; and (3) the challenge of ineffective pedagogy. Invoking the metaphor of the "third rail," which refers to the danger inherent to touching the line that supplies electricity to a subway, the authors refer to the three as "third-rail" challenges.