A $3 million federal grant will unleash the potential of UC Santa Cruz to be a leading Hispanic-serving research institution by advancing educational equity among graduate students. This latest grant builds on the cross-campus partnership between faculty, staff, and administrators who comprise the HSI Leadership Committee.
The grant—Graduating and Advancing New American Scholars: Promoting Postbaccalaureate Opportunities for Hispanic Americans (GANAS PPOHA)—from the U.S. Department of Education will help the campus increase the readiness of Latinx, low-income and students of color from UC Santa Cruz and CSU Monterey Bay to apply and succeed in graduate programs.
Director of HSI Initiatives Charis Herzon said the campus is increasingly focused on how it can strengthen the ‘S’in HSI—serving—while also diversifying its graduate student population, its faculty, and its staff.
“The Department of Education Title V grants are institution-building grants with the goal of transforming higher education to better serve all students,” Herzon said. “This grant seeks to serve our students at the graduate level in two ways, creating programs for our undergraduates to increase the number of Latinx and low-income students seeking and enrolling in graduate school and supporting the success of our Latinx and low-income students that are in our graduate programs.”
UC Santa Cruz is one of only 22 Hispanic Serving Institutions in the nation that are also doctorate-granting universities with high levels of research activity (an R1 Carnegie classification) and one of the four HSIs that are members of the Association of American Universities. The campus is the only UC to have received a grant from the Department of Education’s Promoting Postbaccalaureate Opportunities for Hispanic Americans (PPOHA) program, which began in 2009.
As an HSI, UC Santa Cruz is striving to build racial equity in higher education opportunities and attainment, while also disrupting already existing institutional barriers to equity.
In September, UC Santa Cruz received a separate $3 million grant, GANAS Career Pathways, to improve academic and career outcomes for undergraduate students and further advance the campus’s capacity to achieve excellence and equity of results across groups.
Both GANAS grants— totalling $6 million spread over five years—are part of the overall HSI campus initiative meant to advance the success of students who are Latinx, underrepresented and from low-income families.
The GANAS PPOHA project for graduate studies focuses on helping to expand the pipeline of undergraduate students who decide to pursue an advanced degree and ensuring they have the tools to succeed.
UC Santa Cruz will offer a number of programs to help undergraduates prepare for graduate school, including a research opportunity program for UCSC and CSUMB students, a course on applying to graduate school, and a course about careers in the creative economy for students in the arts.
To support students in earning an advanced degree, UC Santa Cruz will also offer workshops in financial planning, establish a graduate student writing center, and develop a first-year experience course that focuses on collective learning.
The campus is aiming to increase the number of Latinx graduate students enrolled at UC Santa Cruz (currently at 219) by 35 percent by fall 2025. In fall 2019, 12 percent of UCSC master’s students identified as Latinx and 11 percent of Ph.D. students identified as Latinx.The campus is also working to increase those students’ sense of belonging at UCSC.
Ultimately, the campus is working to increase graduate degree completion for Latinx, low-income, and graduate students of color by 3 percentage points by fall 2025.
“This is a very exciting moment for the HSI Initiative on campus,” said Juan Poblete, professor of literature and co-principal investigator. “We are closing our first three HSI grants and with our two new GANAS grants moving, for the first time, beyond a focus on the early years of undergraduate education towards the latter years, and now graduate school and professional life.
“We are covering more of the educational pipeline and that is both exciting and challenging, because it places UCSC at the vanguard of HSRIs — HSIs that are high level research institutions— in the nation. We want to show that excellence and equity not only can, but should go together.”
UC Santa Cruz has been awarded five grants totaling $15.9 million since earning the HSI designation.
