Could you please discuss your project?

A real concern in this country is the number of Hispanic students who do not complete a four year college degree. The majority of Hispanic high school graduates gravitate toward two-year institutions and programs. Of those, very few transfer to four-year institutions.

Over the years I’ve been involved with several grants helping Hispanic students get to college. One of those granting organizations was Washington-based Walmart/Excelencia in Education, which helps improve the number of Latino students who graduate from college -- that’s their focus. A specific area of their vision is to improve the transfer experience for Hispanic Students.

In California the majority of students who can’t come to LMU for the full duration choose to attend a two-year institution to start, and transfer over for the completion of their undergraduate education. LMU is committed and intentional about offering transfer students a path to a B.A., Hispanic students as well as those from every race, ethnicity and religious perspective.

This grant is a possibility for us to do that and become better at it.

What influenced you to take action with this project? Is there an “origin” story?

What happened was we in Enrollment Management got together with Student Affairs and said, “Okay we know Hispanic students who transfer here do really well. How can we go about informing them of the programs our institution offers? How do we get them to do even better once they’re here, graduate, and take on leadership roles?” The Walmart/Excelencia in Education award is a one year grant which allows us to organize events and programs, that we couldn’t otherwise do to accomplish these goals.

An example of this is our Adelante program. Adelante means to “move forward” in Spanish. This Student Affairs leadership program has taken 17 Fall transfer students of Hispanic descent coming in from community colleges, and placed them into a special leadership orientation along with enrolling them in a one credit course focused on leadership development.

The large piece in terms of outreach is our commitment to hosting four transfer preview days here on campus. The funding will essentially enable us to reach out to these community colleges and say “We can cover travel expenses for a group of your students to get them to LMU, spend the day hearing about our various programs, taking a campus tour, eating some pizza, and just generally showing them what LMU is about.” We have had over 500 community college students, joined by their advisors and some parents, participate in our Fall preview days!

We have an on-campus team working on raising awareness about this program and informing the community colleges of an alliance day in which we plan to work with the staff and administration of the respective colleges and inform them about LMU, our mission, and to show them around the campus in an effort to reach as broad an audience as possible. The grant funding has made all this and more possible.

How would you describe the potential effects and results of your work to an educated layman?

This is an attempt to influence ambition and raise the comfort level of first generation college students. A campus can be an intimidating place for newcomers and once they come here and have a chance to walk around, they can become familiar with the idea of aspiring to accomplish a bachelor’s degree at a four year institution. We do our best to inform them about the various ways they can work on making this dream a reality.