On Martin Luther King's birthday, the Sacramento Bee newspaper for California's state capitol published an op-ed by Center for Urban Education's (CUE) executive director Linda J. Wong and CUE co-directors Estela Mara Bensimon and Alicia C. Dowd, which applauded new federal diversity guidelines for U.S. colleges and universities.

Issued in December by the Justice and Education departments, the new guidelines make it possible for higher education institutions to consider race and ethnicity if race-neutral measures like household income, geography or standardized tests aren't enough to achieve their diversity goals.

In "New Diversity Guidelines Can Break College Barriers," Bensimon, Dowd and Wong encouraged education leaders to take advantage of these important changes and incorporate them into pipeline programs and other initiatives to expand college opportunities for Latino and black students.

To read the op-ed, click here.

Eau Claire Honors Program Makes Leap in Student Diversity

On February 10^th, the University of Wisconsin (UW) Eau Claire's Honors Program received the 2012 Board of Regents' Diversity Award in the Team Category-the first of its kind.The award recognizes "institutional change agents who have had a significant impact in promoting equity" and shows "exactly how the Equity Scorecard can be used to change institutional practices," according to the award letter from the Board of Regents' president and the chair of the Board of Regents Diversity Awards Committee.

(L-R) Dr. David Jones, Dr. Jeff Vahlbusch, and Regent Charles Pruitt

Faculty and staff from UW Eau Claire began working with CUE in 2008 and examined multicultural student participation in its honors program as part of their Equity Scorecard™ work. After a year of self-study, they produced an interim report showing that students of color were seriously under-represented: out of nearly four hundred students officially enrolled in the honors program at that time, only seven were racial/ethnic minorities. As a result of the report's findings, Jeff Vahlbusch, an associate professor of German who became the honors program director in 2009, along with his colleagues, decided that it was time for fundamental change.  Admissions criteria under the old program were limited to ACT test score results and high school class ranking. However, the only rationale for setting the test score and rank cut-offs was to keep the numbers of admitted honors students "manageable."

Dr. Vahlbusch, along with colleagues like David Jones, professor of English and the Honors faculty fellow, and Honors Council student and faculty members, proceeded to develop a broader set of criteria for a pilot with input from other campus stakeholders. They included: academic accomplishments and potential (GPA, ACT or SAT scores, and high school class rank); employment, extracurricular and/or service activities; rigor of senior year high school course work; potential to diversify the honors program; and special talents, abilities, experiences and/or achievements. In the first year with these holistic elements in place, the pilot program attracted 18 students, 13 of whom were members of underrepresented groups.   

For fall 2012, the third year of the pilot, the honors program has so far sent out invitations to 102 holistically selected students, 51 of whom are from underrepresented student groups - 7 African Americans; 7 American Indians; 11 Latinos/as; 3 Pacific Islanders; and 23 Hmong and other Asian Americans. According to Dr. Vahlbusch, "Without the holistic process, we would have missed every single one of these 102 Honors students."  

Oshkosh Establishes Transfer Center with Findings from Equity Scorecard™

Officially launched in fall 2011, the transfer center is partnering with two UW Colleges, Fox and Fond du Lac, to recruit more students of color, improve the transfer transition process, and increase transfer student participation in high impact practices like undergraduate research and internships. The transfer center will play a critical role in student success, since forty percent of Oshkosh's undergraduates are transfer students who come mainly from the Fox and Fond du Lac Colleges.

One of the transfer center's priorities is to reach out early to students of color as they're exploring transfer options. Findings from CUE's study showed that many students of color did not complete their transfer applications because they typically don't meet with an advisor until after they're accepted.To address this problem, transfer center staff will conduct early outreach at the two UW Colleges and help these students complete their applications and the enrollment process.   

According to Carleen Vande Zande, assistant vice chancellor, UW Oshkosh's goal is to increase representational equity of transfer students of color by five percent annually.To gauge progress, it will examine the number of students of color in the transfer pool and follow them through the application and enrollment process, as well as their use of transfer center resources and participation in high impact practices.

New Equity Scorecard™ Projects Launched

Pennsylvania Partners with CUE to Strengthen Equitable Outcomes in Its Performance-Based Funding Program 

According to PASSHE's leadership, the partnership with CUE represents a key strategy to achieve performance goals in student access and success under the system's performance-based funding program. 

Through CUE's signature Equity Scorecard™ process, researchers will assist the PASSHE universities in developing equity indicators and benchmark goals that will help them increase access and graduation rates for historically underserved student populations.

On January 19 - 20, team leaders and institutional researchers from each of the PASSHE campuses were introduced to the Equity Scorecard™ process and the conceptual framework for organizational learning and change. In February, about 150 team members met for two days to kick off their Scorecard activities. Over the next two years, they will learn to use disaggregated student data and participatory action research methodology to examine their classroom and institutional practices to determine what can be done to improve equitable outcomes for their students.

Loyola Marymount University-Los Angeles (LMU-LA) and Whittier College have partnered with CUE to implement a two-year demonstration project to increase success for community college students enrolled at these institutions. Funded by the Teagle Foundation, the project will develop strategies to help students make the leap from public two-year colleges to four-year private nonprofit institutions of higher education.

Both LMU-LA and Whittier College have formed evidence teams made up of faculty, administrators, institutional researchers and program staff. Team members will examine student cohort data from their top feeder community colleges and investigate institutional practices that affect outcomes for transfer students. 

This demonstration project comes at a particularly crucial time in California as budget cuts have forced the California State University System and the University of California to limit enrollments for in-state students. Private liberal arts colleges and universities can pick up some of the slack and ensure that more community college transfer students succeed if they can identify the key interventions needed to reduce bottlenecks in the transfer and graduation pathways.