For Gema Ludisaca, a first-generation college student at California State University at Northridge, becoming a college professor would be a dream.
“I can’t think of a better thing than to be paid to do research and teach people about your ideas,” says Ms. Ludisaca, one of 30 undergraduate fellows in a new program that aims to expand the ranks of Hispanic faculty members in the humanities.
One university hopes to narrow the performance gap by providing mentors for Latino undergraduates, who in turn mentor schoolchildren.
But her parents, who are undocumented immigrants from Ecuador, see that prospect a bit differently. They’re proud of her, to be sure, but they’re also a bit worried about how she will care for her 5-year-old son.
“They tell me ‘you have a child, your responsibility is to get a job and provide for him,’” she says. “To them, the monetary takes priority over learning. It’s difficult to explain to them.”
This summer, Ms. Ludisaca is taking part in a six-week seminar on her campus and conducting research with a faculty mentor. It’s the first phase of HSI Pathways to the Professoriate, a program that will train undergraduates at Hispanic-Serving Institutions — nonprofit colleges where at least 25 percent of full-time-equivalent undergraduate enrollment is Hispanic — for academic careers.
The Pathways project, created by the Penn Center for Minority Serving Institutions, is the latest effort by colleges to cultivate a faculty that mirrors the nation’s growing ethnic and racial diversity. The student fellows are both male and female and come from three Hispanic-Serving Institutions: Cal State at Northridge, Florida International University, and the University of Texas at El Paso. Faculty members from five partner research institutions teach the seminar classes and mentor the students.
In 2015, 72 percent of all professors were white, but only 55 percent of undergraduates were, according to Education Department data. Hispanics were particularly underrepresented, accounting for 18 percent of undergraduates but just five percent of the faculty. And that gulf is growing.
Among Hispanics, males still hold a majority of the top jobs — and represent 64 percent of full professors. But that’s starting to change as Latinas outnumber Latinos in graduate school. In the 2014-15 academic year, Latinas earned 64 percent of master’s degrees and 55 percent of doctorates.
The shortage of Hispanic professors of both sexes is partly due to a “pipeline” problem. Latinos constituted just six percent of doctoral-degree recipients in 2014-15, according to the Education Department. A majority of them attended Hispanic-Serving Institutions and public universities.
There are several theories for why more Hispanics aren’t pursuing Ph.D.s, but one barrier seems to be financial: First-generation students (and their immigrant parents) often crave financial security — something academe, with its fierce competition for faculty jobs, can’t guarantee.
Students who, like Ms. Ludisaca, decide to take the gamble often find themselves losing out to graduates from more elite institutions, says Deborah Santiago, co-founder of Excelencia in Education, a nonprofit group that supports Hispanic success in higher education.
The shortage of Hispanic and other minority professors limits the diversity of viewpoints taught in the classroom, and makes it harder for Latino students to see themselves as professors, says Ana Luszczynska, the Pathways coordinator at Florida International. She says she spends a lot of time convincing her students that they’re grad-school material. “Without saying anything, what’s being evinced is that this is the province of white people,” says Ms. Luszczynska, an associate professor of English.
Elizabeth A. Say, dean of the College of Humanities at Cal State at Northridge, says the program will give her students the help they need to get into highly ranked Ph.D. programs, while enhancing her regional institution’s visibility and prestige.
“It’s a chance to say our students are every bit as good,” she says. “They may need more support, but give them a chance, and they’ll succeed.”
Pathways to the Professoriate grew out of a decade-old program that brings students from minority-serving institutions to the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education for a crash course on navigating graduate school. Some 250 students have attended that program to date, and 233 have gone on to graduate school, 41 of them at Penn.
Marybeth Gasman, creator of that program, wanted to do something more ambitious, so she approached the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation about creating a wrap-around program that would shepherd Hispanic students directly into graduate school. The foundation, which was already underwriting undergraduate research at minority-serving institutions, liked the idea, and provided $5.1-million for it.
The Pathways project gives participants a summer research stipend, pays for their GRE prep and grad-school application fees, and provides students with mentors in their undergraduate and graduate programs. It offers an online “lodge,” where the fellows can chat with each other and start building their academic network, and it holds a weekly seminar, led by Hispanic graduate students, where fellows “can see someone who looks like them but is a little further along,” Ms. Gasman says.
She says she focused the program on Hispanic-serving institutions because half of Latino and Latina undergraduates attend them, and because they send a larger share of students to grad school than do predominantly white institutions.
“So often in the academy, we get fixated on certain students at certain institutions,” she says. “There are so many people who would be amazing professors, but they’re overlooked because we have such a narrow view of where professors come from.”
Ms. Ludisaca, who has never had a Latina professor during her three years at Cal State, says having a mentor who looks like her has made getting her Ph.D. seem less like a “faraway dream.”
“A lot of us have impostor syndrome, and a lot of that comes from not having that visual representation of yourself” in the classroom, she says. “Seeing that there are people from similar situations who have made it makes all the difference.”
