By Adrian H. Huerta
Many years ago, as a new college student and a man of color, I readily admitted that I needed help to understand how to become successful as an undergraduate student. I was lucky that I found a handful of university staff of color who were invested in my personal and academic success and promoted graduate education as a pathway to make a difference in the lives of others through research and practice.
So, beginning in 2018, when I had the opportunity to explore how institutions support their men of color (funded by the ECMC Foundation), I was eager to delve into this area. With this scholarship between 2018 and 2021, I identified multiple areas for growth and refinement in such college retention programmatic efforts. Some may ask, why focus on men of color in higher education? Well, fewer than 20% of men of color, which I define as Black, Latino, Native American, Southeast Asian American and Pacific Islander men, possessed a four-year college degree in 20121 , and these numbers have not improved in 20222.
To further the research, in 2022 a program officer at the ECMC Foundation approached me to explore supporting their efforts to develop a grantmaking fund focused on men of color and college equity.
Over the three years of studying men of color programs, I found that consistent institutional funding and limited staffing infrastructure were the issues in helping men of color feel welcomed and supported at their universities and a need for more data collection to understand the impact. But the more significant issue is that men of color programs are tasked with solving structural issues that should be the responsibility of college executives to foster a better sense of community from the admissions office to financial aid; too often, college faculty and staff are allowed to mistreat students with no recourse.
Although men of color programs’ budgets often hovered between $5,000 to $50,000/year to provide band-aids for structural problems that impact students’ experience in hostile classrooms and campuses, program staff are limited in their daily activities, as they may be mentoring dozens of students, designing programming, recruiting new students, fundraising and other activities that take away from data collection and assessment. When men-of-color programs were well-designed and had stable funding, students were able to become emotionally vulnerable and supportive of each other, leading to enhanced definitions of masculinity, emotional awareness and support systems that empowered students to feel that they could overcome micro- and macro hurdles in college to be on the path towards graduation.3
Returning to my efforts with ECMC men of color funding project, throughout 2022, Andrea Venezia, Saul Valdez and I would regularly meet to discuss the potential funding structure for the first pilot initiative (now known as “Takeoff,” led by my USC colleague Shaun Harper). Our efforts included locating local, state, and federal data about the successes and areas for refined support for college men of color such as enrollment, retention, and graduation rates, and strategizing about “how” to secure institutional and executive administrative investment into these retention programs.
In Fall 2022, the ECMC Foundation board approved a $20 million and five-year commitment to support men of color-focused research and practice grants. As an early career scholar, I feel great pride and satisfaction that I supported a national foundation philanthropic investment in college students like me. “Takeoff” now supports 12 community college men of color programs to help students retain and persist to graduation. I have heard of additional non-profits and research centers receiving grants to improve their scalability and impact for boys and men of color across the U.S., and that is beyond rewarding.
