What can Cal Poly do to become a truly diverse campus? Experts have some ideas

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The People’s University

A 4-part series on the challenge of diversity at Cal Poly

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Cal Poly is getting more diverse, but will the whitest CSU ever look like California?

‘It’s happening to me every day’: How Cal Poly students of color cope with racism, isolation

How does Cal Poly attract students of color to a majority-white campus?

What can Cal Poly do to become a truly diverse campus? Experts have some ideas

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Editor’s note: This is the fourth and final story in The Tribune’s four-part series called “The People’s University,” examining the challenge of diversity at Cal Poly.

Cal Poly officials say they want its student body to better reflect the demographics of California. But doing so can be a slow process and there’s no one-size-fits-all, no perfect guidebook, about just how to do it.

Still, experts interviewed by The Tribune said there are strategies they’re familiar with that the university could implement to attract a larger number of high-achieving students from underrepresented backgrounds.

One of the most important things Cal Poly should do first, they said, is improve outreach strategies to bring more of those students to the university.

Brandon Tuck, Cal Poly Pomona’s director of admissions, said it’s important for universities to be aggressive in connecting with diverse students.

“In some of the communities that I know our outreach group goes into, they can barely see college as a future. And so we have to get in front of them,” Tuck said.

Bolstering and using the state-funded Educational Opportunity Programs (EOP) and federally-funded TRIO Programs to their fullest extents is another good first step, experts said. Those programs were born out of the Civil Rights movement era and are designed to recruit and support historically disadvantaged and underrepresented students.

Then, ensuring those programs work alongside, not apart from, Cal Poly Scholars — a university-specific scholarship program for low-income students that is funded primarily by out-of-state student fees — would confirm Cal Poly is taking advantage of each program’s strengths to bring in and retain more diverse students.

“You want all these things to be operated jointly so they can have influence and they can be used efficiently,” said Maureen Hoyler, the president of the Council for Opportunity in Education, a national nonprofit organization that works to expand college opportunities for low-income students, first-generation college students and students with disabilities.

Experts say recruitment is key to boosting university diversity

At Cal Poly Pomona, recruiting a diverse body of students and convincing them to apply is paramount to ensuring a diverse student body enrolls, Tuck said.

Boost one, and you’ll boost the other.

“I think that’s the biggest thing in admissions: If you have a more diverse applicant pool, then that trickles down to your enrollment, so you have a diverse pool from which to pick from,” Tuck said.

At Cal Poly Pomona, 14.8% of the 41,223 first-time freshman applicants for fall 2021 were white, 46.2% were Hispanic or Latino, 27% were Asian American, 3% were Black and 0.07% Native American.

That has resulted in a student body that is 14% white, 50% Hispanic or Latino, 22% Asian American, 2.9% Black and 0.11% Native American.

Compare that to San Luis Obispo, where underrepresented minority students, for the most part, aren’t applying to Cal Poly in the same ratio that white students are.

For fall 2021, white prospective students made up 35.7% of Cal Poly’s 54,571 applicants.

About 25.5% of the applicants were Asian American, 24.4% Hispanic or Latino, 1.6% Black and 0.1% Native American, according to Cal Poly data.

That kind of breakdown has translated into a student population that is 53.3% white, 19.4% Hispanic or Latino, 13.5% Asian American, 0.7% Black and 0.12% Native American, as of fall 2021.

Take a deeper look, and you’ll find white students are more likely to be accepted into Cal Poly than non-white students.

University data show that for fall 2021, about 37.7% of white applicants, or 2,541 students, were accepted.

That’s while 30.2% of Hispanic or Latino applicants, or 4,011 students; 30% of Asian American applicants, 4,178 students, were accepted.

For Black applicants, 21.5%, or 190 students, were accepted while 22.7% of Native American applicants, 15 students, were accepted.

Those stats show a clear and present problem that Cal Poly must address: It can’t diversify its student body if students of color don’t first apply in the numbers the university needs.

One step Cal Poly can take is to ensure these students know Cal Poly is an option for them, Hoyler said.

“Oftentimes you get, ‘Well, it’s not our problem, people just don’t come here.’ ... Well, then you figure out what you need to do so that there’s a sufficient pipeline,” she said. “Given these numbers in terms of race and ethnicity, clearly the groups they want to be serving in significant numbers are Black and Latino students. And they need to go get those students. They don’t need to wait for the students to come to them.”

Shaun Harper, a professor and founder of the University of Southern California’s Race and Equity Center, said universities who are successful at boosting their diversity often start with a concentrated effort to get their name in front of more students.

Sometimes, Harper said, that means bringing kids to campus. Although Cal Poly does this, Harper suggested that more, earlier in the process, is needed.

Giving an example from USC, he said institutions who are serious about increasing student diversity are “very, very intentional about bringing people to campus.”

“There are lots of folks who grew up or who still live a five-minute drive away from the USC campus who had never been here because they didn’t know that they were welcome,” he said.

So, what the university has done is bolster summer camps for students of color, and Harper’s Equity Center sends college tutors out into marginalized communities to help young students, he said.

At Cal Poly Pomona, Tuck said they ensure that “strategic partnerships” with groups such as Project Caminos, Residential Intensive Summer Education, Project Rebound, Upward Bound, Educational Talent Search and Renaissance Scholars are well-funded and well-staffed. Those programs — some of which are under the umbrella of TRIO and EOP — help low-income, marginalized or educationally disadvantaged students to apply to, attend and graduate from college.

He also said the university has found it needs to start recruiting students earlier — at the middle school level — to ensure they work hard in high school with the goal of college in mind. Underrepresented minority students are less likely to see “college as a default” after high school, so it’s part of the university’s job to change that so they can attract those students, Tuck said.

Harper said using a completely “race-blind approach” to recruit students is not effective enough for Cal Poly to truly increase its diversity.

“The institutions that are most effective — it’s very clear that we are establishing partnerships with communities of color,” he said. “They’re not imprecise about what it is they’re doing. They’re very clear that ‘we want more Latinx students,’ for example. So, therefore, we’re going to cultivate more partnerships with the Latinx community.”

Both Harper and Tuck noted that these efforts take time and money.

“Yeah, it is a little more work — my team is used to my crazy ideas,” Tuck said. “But, you know, we create systems; we put things in place to make it work. We challenge ourselves just like we challenge the students.”

Universities must focus on funding inclusive programming, clubs

Part of a university’s recruitment efforts is ensuring that when students are looking at applying to a prospective school, they see it supports its students to the fullest extent.

“Why would somebody want to go to a campus where they’re made to feel uncomfortable? Why would you if they have a choice of another place to go?” asked Hoyler. “Why would they choose to stay if they’re not made to feel welcome?”

These are questions Cal Poly must address, she added, and turning to the students who experience what happens when there is such a lack of diversity will likely provide the best answers.

When asked what Cal Poly could do to create a more inclusive culture on campus, students largely pointed toward the lack of funding made available to programs and clubs that support historically underrepresented and disadvantaged students.

Cal Poly does have a MultiCultural Center, created in 1981, that provides support and funding to cultural clubs and programs on campus. It serves as a physical space where students can use computers to complete schoolwork or hang out with other students.

But students want more, especially since the small MultiCultural Center room is usually jam-packed with students studying, organizing events or meeting with their respective clubs.

Cal Poly is working to bolster the center — it’s part of the Student Diversity & Belonging office at the university, which received nearly $300,000 in 2013 and now receives around $2 million annually for its various initiatives, according to Keith Humphrey, Cal Poly’s vice president for student affairs.

“When you look at all of our funding we dedicate to DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) activities in student affairs, it is approaching $5 million — most of that is new funding that I have put in place for new positions, programs, services during my time at Cal Poly,” said Humphrey, who was hired at the university in 2012.

The university also opened a new Native American & Indigenous Cultural Center on campus in October — following the already-established Black Academic Excellence Center in 2016 and Dream Center for undocumented students established in 2017.

“(The Native American & Indigenous Cultural Center has) been a labor of love for many years to try and get that made. And that stands as a huge step forward for Native American and Indigenous students on campus,” said Wyatt Kohler, a Native American student who is vice president of Cal Poly’s American Indian Students Association. “We’ve been encouraging Cal Poly and the student administration to reach out to more Native American students on reservations and elsewhere in the country because there are 10 million Native American students, so we’re out there.”

Cal Poly is years behind other universities in establishing similar safe spaces for students.

Cal Poly Pomona, for example, established its Native American Student Center in 1998.

Students said they envision a large, central building or area on campus that would host the university’s cultural clubs and program.

Tucked in the bottom floor of the University Union, the current MultiCultural Center space is far too small, they said, and the Native American and Indigenous Cultural Center and Black Academic Excellence Center are far away from each other on campus, creating cultural silos where collaboration on events or resources is more difficult.

“(One large cultural space on campus is) not to separate all of our different cultural groups from the majority white population on this campus,” said Chloe Wardrick, Cal Poly’s Black Student Union president. “It’s really just telling people that are interested in coming to Cal Poly that we’re here, we’re in this huge building and if you want to come in, please come in.”

Programs designed to help marginalized students should be well-funded, collaborative, experts say

Cal Poly must also ensure the very programs designed to recruit, retain and graduate underrepresented and disadvantaged students are funded and functioning well together, experts said.

Students in support services programs such as EOP and TRIO are about 18% more likely to graduate than similar low-income, minority or historically disadvantaged students who aren’t in those programs, Hoyler said.

Ensuring such success takes a “deliberate, thoughtful use” of the federal and state grants given to universities for TRIO and EOP, she added.

“Most institutions look at the programs and say, ‘Well, where do we have issues of underrepresentation and retention?’” Hoyler said. “And so, if you had huge issues among, let’s say, biology students, or minority students, Black students, or students from certain high schools ... you look at all your outreach and retention programs and say, where we have problems, let’s use these programs to address these problems.”

Years ago, the University of California at Berkeley found it had several programs such as TRIO and EOP operating in silos, most with a single funding source, according to Fabrizio Mejia, the university’s assistant vice chancellor for the division of equity & inclusion, who saw it as an issue.

“Part of what was happening 10 years or so ago was that the programs were either not at the scale they needed to be, or not sustainable financially, or could not really talk about impact through qualitative or quantitative ways of presenting the data,” he said. “So, we began to change all that many years ago and began to say that any program that relies on any one source of funding is in danger.”

Mejia began asking program directors what their program’s “bread and butter” was, and if they had enough funding to achieve the program’s goals to recruit, retain and support diverse students at the university.

It wasn’t as though Berkeley could start throwing money at the programs out of the university’s budget, so Mejia was forced to get creative.

Fundraising and pursuing donations from outside sources became key, he said.

It wasn’t easy — “I didn’t know anything about fundraising before I started fundraising,” Mejia joked.

But as he pushed to get people to realize the importance and impact of the programs he was asking for donations to, things shifted.

“We laugh sometimes because we remember how we would get that $1,000 grant, and we would be high-fiving each other because we know what it means — for two students to be able to get $500 each was a big deal,” he said. “And now we’re doing 10 times, 20 times the amount of grants.”

Mejia said that the effort has helped to substantially grow those support programs beyond the constraints afforded to them by the limited state and federal funding. The change has diversified Berkeley’s student body by bringing “equity and parity to communities that don’t have the navigational capital to interface” with the university, he added.

Diversifying Cal Poly will take time, effort and money

Mejia stressed in particular the amount of time and work it took for things to change at UC Berkeley. He said the vision was always there, but implementation seemed elusive.

The same goes for Tuck at Cal Poly Pomona — rewriting the way the university recruits to ensure students of color were not being overlooked was not an undertaking embarked upon lightly.

“People want to go to a CSU because they want to be part of a diverse environment,” he said. “And so why not create that?”

Harper of USC urges universities in Cal Poly’s situation to acknowledge more is needed and to take a fearless approach.

“The university has to have a different strategy,” Harper said. “They cannot keep employing the same strategy year after year for the same result. It needs a new strategy if it’s serious about diversifying the student body.”

Some faculty at Cal Poly appear to be growing increasingly frustrated as their efforts to propose solutions to diversify the university and create a more inclusive campus aren’t realized by the administration.

“One of the most dangerous things, I think, is to say, ‘This is the way we’ve always done it,’” said Nelitza Morales, a former program coordinator for the university’s TRIO Achievers program. “And that very much seems to be the motto at Cal Poly.”

José Navarro, a professor of ethnic studies at Cal Poly, said time after time he’s seen university officials tout their diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. But real change hasn’t made as much of a splash, he said.

“I think there’s a reluctance — and then we come back to economics and resources. Then Cal Poly says, ‘Well, it’s Berkeley and UCLA. They have more resources. We can’t do this,’” Navarro said. “And I’m not sure that’s an acceptable answer anymore, that, ‘We can’t do it.’ At some point, it’s that you won’t do it.”

Meanwhile, Cal Poly continues to remain the whitest public university in California, and its students of color continue to feel isolated and are insulted by racist microaggressions. Many look to the university’s leadership for direction and clarity on how it will make the campus more welcoming and inclusive for all who attend.

And although Cal Poly has made gains over the past decade in growing the racial and ethnic diversity of its student body, university officials acknowledge they have much more work ahead of them.

“We care and we’re constantly doing more to support individuals. We can’t change overnight the community we live in, we can’t change overnight the demographics, but we are working hard,” Armstrong said. “I’m proud of the progress we’ve made. But I also recognize that we have to do better.”

Mackenzie Shuman

The Tribune

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Mackenzie Shuman primarily writes about SLO County education and the environment for The Tribune. She’s originally from Monument, Colorado, and graduated from Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication in May 2020. When not writing, Mackenzie spends time outside hiking and rock climbing.