By Melody Wang
Daily Bruin Contributor
With the end of affirmative action in admissions, many UCLA
student groups said they felt the need to develop their own forms
of outreach to increase the enrollment of underrepresented
students.
While the university outreach programs focus on encouraging
students to attend the UCs, student-initiated programs focus more
generally on encouraging any form of higher education.
The problem of diversity at UCLA cannot be solved without
addressing the problem that few minority students receive any form
of higher education after high school, said Li’i Furumoto,
Student-Initiated Outreach Committee Chair.
“The reason there aren’t a lot of students of color
is because there’s a lack of education in K through
12,” Furumoto said.
The SIOC, which was established in Spring of 1998, received
$105,000 from the Community and Retention Empowerment referendum,
which was passed last spring and increased student fees by $5 each
quarter. In January, Chancellor Albert Carnesale agreed to match
the $105,000 giving SIOC a total of $210,000.
Of the $105,000, $55,000 came from the chancellor’s office
while $50,000 came from the Office of Student Affairs.
With this money, SIOC currently funds outreach programs by
Pacific Island Student Association, African Student Union, Samahang
Pilipino, American Indian Student Association, Vietnamese Student
Union and MEChA.
Furumoto said that the outreach groups use a “holistic
empowerment model,” not just helping students with their
academics, but also taking into consideration what influences a
student’s academics, such as their family life and economic
status.
Each of these outreach programs targets high school students and
encourages them to pursue forms of higher education. Members of the
outreach programs say that high school is the perfect time to start
exposing students to the idea of attending college, even if
it’s not a UC.
“I think high school is a good time because that’s
really when college becomes real for (students),” said Jesse
De Guia, director of Samahang Pilipino Advanced Community
Empowerment.
But Jack Sutton, the executive director of Outreach Steering
Committee, which coordinates and evaluates outreach programs on
campus, said that though high school is a good time to do outreach,
it is also important to remember that elementary and middle school
can be a time when certain types of outreach can be effective.
For instance, he said that many economically disadvantaged
students feel that higher education at a university like UCLA is
not attainable for them. In this case, students as young as 5 can
be informed that they have the ability for higher education.
But members of student outreach programs focus mainly on high
school students and consistently attend at least one high school
anywhere from once to four times a week to mentor and tutor
students.
Furumoto said that one of the advantages student-initiated
outreach programs have over university programs is that the
students understand the different cultures of the students
targeted.
“Those people come from the same background and should be
the ones talking to the students,” she said. “They can
relate to each other.”
Furumoto added that unlike university outreach programs which
only target high school students with GPAs higher than 3.5, each of
these SIOC programs does not exclude anyone, which makes funding
even more necessary.
“Students feel that’s a really elitist way of
outreach,” Furumoto said.
Student-initiated outreach programs are also able to
specifically target smaller minority groups such as Asian Pacific
Islanders and American Indians, while the university targets
students at high schools that do not usually send students to UC
campuses.
Sutton said that because of a UC mandate, the university
outreach programs cannot target as many students as student
programs. Instead, the university programs target only
educationally disadvantaged students.
He said that the university programs either help disadvantaged
schools send more students to the UCs or they directly work with
the students.
“University outreach doesn’t target really “˜at
risk’ students, but targets those on the UC track or close to
the UC track,” Sutton said.
He added that student and university programs simply have
different purposes and different methods.
“It’s not to say that one is right and one is
wrong,” Sutton said. “Not only are both necessary, I
think we could come up with a couple more that would be just as
effective.”
The problem with this is funding, which is already limited.
Most of SIOC’s money currently goes to paying for
transportation from UCLA to the different high schools and for the
salaries of staff members. But there is not enough to pay everyone
involved with the programs, making them heavily dependent on
volunteers.
Thesa Hall, chair of the African Student Union’s Students
Heightening Academic Performance through Education Program, the
oldest and largest outreach program, said that they are
understaffed and don’t have enough money, but they do reach
out to a lot of students.
“We don’t close our doors to anyone,” Hall
said.
Thus, the program ends up having 85 to 100 kids when there are
only four or five staff members.
While some volunteers are extremely dedicated, it is hard for
others to attend the weekly meetings with students
consistently.
The MEChA College Bound Program is currently experiencing this
problem. Assistant Director Rosalio Rubio said that seeing the same
volunteers continuously makes high school students feel more
comfortable.
“They expect to see that same person; they don’t and
they get discouraged and stop coming,” he said.
Rubio said that paying outreach mentors and tutors or providing
them with some sort of incentive would help encourage them to
consistently attend weekly meetings.
Furumoto added that more money is also needed so that an
electronic database can be created to keep track of the progress of
the students.
Currently, SIOC keeps individual folders of each student’s
transcripts and grades. SIOC reaches out to more than 1,000
students through its tutoring and mentor programs.
“We definitely need more funding to pay for computers and
for better offices,” Furumoto said.