Minority grad students must have financial aid to survive

By Rich Luttrell
Spring/Summer 1994; pages 37-38
Tejas

Ten years ago, Charles Ramirez-Berg looked forward to a limited career teaching linguistics, English, and communication - anything related to film at the University of Texas at El Paso.

Ramirez-Berg's academic career was blocked since he lacked a Ph.D., and held a responsibility to his wife and three young children. Returning to school would take food off of the table, but was the only way he could move ahead.

Ten years ago, UT Austin sponsored a recruitment trip headed by Sarita Brown, director of the Graduate Opportunities Program.

"I met Sarita during a GOP recruitment trip to El Paso, where I was teaching. A friend of mine from the oral history department invited me to the union to meet this friend (Brown) from Austin. I filled out one of the application cards, and the rest is history.

"GOP resources allowed me to come to graduate school with a family and survive while I was doing it," recalls Ramirez-Berg, associate professor in the Department of Radio-TV-Film. By the fall of 1987, Ramirez attained his Ph.D., and was promoted to Associate Professor, a significant journey from part-time lecturer at UTEP.

For a large state university like UT to effectively serve taxpayers, it must include the minority community in its scope of people. By increasing minority presence on universities and delivering leadership skills to minorities, the university acknowledges the fastest growing segments of their demographics, says analysts.

The GOP, UT's minority affairs office, helps minority students with the academic ability and desire to study in graduate school, but are financially unable. The program administers 25 recruitment fellowships and 10 continuing fellowships to African-Americans, Latinos, Native Americans and Puerto Ricans out of a pool of around 150 yearly nominations.

Last year, Jorge Chapa became director of the GOP, after Brown. Chapa, a former full time professor at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at UT Austin, cut his teaching and research by three-fourths. Chapa takes Wednesdays to teach a graduate course on Texas Border Policy this fall.

Although his administrative and professorial duties leave little free time ("Here's today's mail," he says while holding up a three-inch stack of papers), his years as a demographer and statistician have created a steady, measured personal approach to large institutions.

Lobbying for money from the budget committee ranks high in running a successful program, and creates the heaviest portion of the workload.

He says getting money in general is not difficult, but "the hard sell is getting more money. I think there will be an increased focus on this area by the administration," Chapa says.

Increasing the GOP's fellowship budget is no new problem, either. According to Brown, who now works as a Principal Partner of the Education Trust for the American Association for Higher Education, "from about 1986 onward, and then increasingly so ... we had every spring larger and larger cohorts of students that had been recommended for admission, in fact even recommended for fellowships. The fellowship committees read and said, of course, they deserve a fellowship."

UT began budgeting money for the GOP in 1981, after a review by the U.S. Office of Civil Rights in the Texas Equal Education Opportunity Plan for Higher Education. However, this was a five year plan, not a piece of legislation.

"If you had not increased (the GOP budget), then you're still taking the same sum of money and you're trying to split it 10, 15, 20 more ways. That's where we felt the greatest disappointment," Brown said.

Currently, doctoral students receive $9,000 for the first two years and $4,500 for the third from the recruitment fellowship. Master's students receive $9,000 and $4,500 for the first two years respectively. The GOP's monthly newsletter, The Back Page, offers an editorial fellowship paying $4,500 a year and covering out of state tuition costs.

Besides the UT fiscal budget, the GOP gets money from the Danforth Compton Fellowship and the Patricia Roberts Harris Fellowship. Both of these sources are doled out in the same increments as the GOP recruitment fellowship, but Danforth Compton fellows may receive support for up to four years.

Also available from the GOP are continuing fellowships and Emergency Aid awards. Continuing fellowships go to previously enrolled students, paying $4,500 over a semester or over the nine month school year. The Emergency Aid awards are used when the student can't finish the semester because of a financial crisis.

"(Fellowships) may not meet all students' needs, but it's enough to get by on. It's enough money to get through,' Chapa explains. Between five and 12 Emergency Aid awards have been given out each academic year since 1983.

"The question is, are (all minority affairs offices) focusing on making sure that talented minority students are going to graduate school. So the whole question of fellowships and financial aid is a critical one for anyone who has to think about going through the Ph.D. program, which right now can take anywhere from six to 10 years," said Alison Bernstein, the Director of Education and Culture at the Ford Foundation in New York.

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For instance, in the College of Communication, the last three years testify to the levels of participation within departments. While the RTF department has had 13 GOP fellows, Journalism and Speech Communication boast only one apiece. The Department of Advertising lists no one.

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As the largest privately funded fellowship Ph.D. program, the Ford Foundation administers 50 fellowships each year to universities nationwide. Run through the National Research Council in Washington, D.C., it delivers fellowships based on merit for doctoral students. It also contributes to UT Austin.

"(The Ford Foundation) is an effort to acknowledge and reward outstanding minority students and help them go through graduate school without incurring a great deal of debt," Bernstein said.

Besides allocating enough money to serve minority graduate students, participation from individual departments in the university proves problematic. "I am interested in creating networks between departments and colleges, to improve efficiency," says Chapa.

For instance, in the College of Communication, the last three years testify to the levels of participation within departments. While the RTF department has had 13 GOP fellows, Journalism and Speech Communication boast only one apiece. The Department of Advertising lists no one.

"In terms of the level of participation, it varies greatly," Brown said. "Even within departments, you will find that there are faculty who, for a combination for reasons - whether it's that they are forward thinkers, and they are well-aware that the composition of society in this country is changing, or for their academic pursuits to have relevance, there must be a connection between what they're doing and the young people coming up through the ranks vs. people who have come from other geographical areas and therefore find it strange when they look at classes that are predominantly Anglo," Brown said.

Consider Texas, where 25.6 of the population in 1990 was Latino, up from 21 percent in 1980.

Ignoring this rapidly growing sector of society dims the future for all Texans, argue proponents. "To people whose academic disciplines encourage (minority recruitment), whether they are in the liberal arts or perhaps in education ... there are people in the sciences and in engineering who are very clear-headed about the implication. If you think that minorities don't do math, and you have a demography that says 50 percent of the first grade classes in Texas are minorities, well, talk that logic through.

"That means as a country we're not going to do math, and all of the disciplines that involve math," Brown said.

The fundamental problems, according to Bernstein, are "the climate of the graduate school, and in particular the department, the amount of mentoring that minority students do or do not get from their advisors ... the sense of alienation ... the introduction to academic research and the valuing of the kind of research that minority students want to be doing in certain fields."

In the arts, humanities, and social sciences from 1980 to 1987, 396 Chicano-focused dissertations were awarded out of 77,840. UT gave out the most with 40, while UCLA came in second with 25.

The U.S. Census Bureau recently reported that the American minority population (African Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos and Native Americans) will be almost equal with the white portion by 2050. Now minorities comprise 25 percent of the 250 million U.S. citizens, and they are predicted to increase to almost 50 percent of the estimated 392 million Americans by 2050.

For the Fall semester of 1993, from the 12th day head count administered by UT's Office of Institutional Studies, total graduate enrollment, excluding law school, is 11,769. Almost nine percent of the total enrollment are minorities, 3.9% male and 4.9% female. This does not include the 336 Asian Americans, who are not served by the GOP.

Asian Americans, according to the Census Bureau, are the fastest growing minority. From three percent now, they are expected to increase to 10% by 2050.

Chapa says that the GOP office gets "some pressure" from this group, but no plans for inclusion in the recruitment program currently exist.

Almost two and 2.5 percent of the UT graduate school is African-American, with 114 males and 174 females. Latinos number 723 total, or a little over 6 percent, with 328 male and 395 females.

Again, the GOP faces problems serving the designated minority groups. "Nationally, we must compete to retain students. Some leave because they are offered a better deal elsewhere," Chapa says. "UCLA is doing well. They also have a budget that is something like 35 times larger than ours," Chapa adds.

"I have seen many examples of institutions that have been much more successful on the financial front. The University of Michigan has a budget of $7.2 million - exclusively for minority students ... Ohio State has $6.8 million; UCLA, even with their current financial trouble, has $17 million for minority fellowships ... These institutions realize that the future is now," wrote Brown in 1991, while still the GOP director.

Part of retaining students involves establishing minority liaison officers. At UT, these faculty members develop a stronger relationship with minority students than other faculty, and work as spokespersons on the micro-level for individual departments.

"The characteristics of our MLO's have been a willingness to spend a lot of time on a one-on-one basis with graduate students. When ... it was time to select an MLO, I looked for a faculty member who was somebody who engaged with minority students, someone who talked to them on a regular basis," said Theresa Sullivan, the former chair of the UT Sociology Department.

This faculty-student relationship improves when the faculty are minorities, according to Chapa.

"Minority faculty make better role models, and they are more approachable.

"It is a chicken-and-egg problem. You need more minorities enrolled in graduate school, but without minority faculty, it's difficult to recruit those students," Chapa says.

"I worry. I worry about the future, as higher education money decreases," Brown said. For Latinos, African-Americans and Native Americans, the budget can't handle them all.

"I think the big issue," said Bernstein, " is that it is a minority affairs office. I think that it should be the responsibility of the Dean of Graduate School and the Provost of the university.

"I think putting it in a separate office that has no clout may be one of the biggest problems. You don't have the senior administrators worrying about it. You have people who report to the senior administrators. When I worked at Princeton, this was a responsibility of the dean of faculty, and that makes a big difference," Bernstein says.