As current high school seniors are going on campus visits and receiving acceptance letters, I am excited. I love seeing all the excited faces as high school students are walking around the campus and how they just look so eager to start college. It is even more special when I see people of color and other minorities because we will get more minorities in academic spaces, usually taken up by white, heterosexual and cisgender men. When I see the minority prospective students, I am hopeful for their journey at whatever school they chose and excited to see more people that look like me, but I am also extremely weary.
Colleges and universities are dying for more diversity. There are accounts of admission offices accepting people that match quotas just so they can get a specific demographic that will look like a new slice of the pie chart. These institutions are in need of more racially ambiguous faces to put on their website front pages and pamphlets so they can brag about how many more Black and Brown faces they have compared to the year before as well as to other institutions. Sadly, these institutions want diversity, but do not want to put in the effort in supporting their minority populations. As more and more first generation students, mostly people of color and of low socioeconomic status, walk college campuses, we are met with more obstacles far earlier than non first generation students.
This issue arises before we even step onto campus. Even navigating the college application process is a heavier ordeal. For students with parents whose first language is not English, a simple thing like explaining financial aid terms or what a dean is can be a struggle. Even students whose parents speak English as their first language have a hard time adjusting because the terms only appear in traditional forms of higher education. This is not to say that our parents are not smart people, (because personally, my parents are the smartest people I know, but they still don’t know “basic” college terms); it just shows how unattainable academia still is.
When we finally step onto campus, we essentially get no help. Orientation is so generic it automatically assumes we all know what a dean of this specific department is, what all the resources we have available to us are, and even more that we know how to take advantage of these resources. We never get checked up on (unless you belong to certain programs) and regardless of how much you think you are prepared, you won’t ever be ready for what PWI’s [predominantly white institutions] throw at you.
PWI’s pride themselves at finally making their class demographics a little more “ethnic,” but they do an awful job at taking care of us. Even though the school accepts us, that does not mean they will do a good job at retaining us. Accepting more minority students is only the beginning. The real issue lies in the way we are treated and helped once we finally start the journey at these institutions.
Catalina Valdez, a Contributing Writer for the Voice, can be reached for comment at CValdez21@wooster.edu.