By Noemi Orozco, Elizabeth Teo, Lena Moreno and Mia Gutierrez, May 13, 2025
As an aspiring immigration attorney, Salma Almusleh enrolled at Cal Poly Pomona with the hope of seeking guidance from professors who could understand her passion for social justice and relate to her as a Latina.
Her assumption that the university’s status as a Hispanic-Serving Institution would provide her with Latino faculty to connect with quickly turned out to be misguided. It wasn’t until her final year at the university she finally had a Latino professor.
While Almusleh was attending CPP, there were approximately 72 Latino students for every one Latino faculty member, according to the most recent equity report from the California Faculty Association. In contrast, the ratios for white and Asian faculty were substantially more balanced, with six white students for every one white faculty member and 19 Asian students for every one Asian faculty member.
“I think that it is a Latino-serving campus, but I don’t see any Latinos serving other Latinos,” Almusleh said.
Almusleh’s search for Latino mentorship within higher education is the case for many Latino students across the California State University system. Latinos comprise nearly half of the students enrolled in the university system, according to the CSU website. However, an analysis from the Campaign for College Opportunity published January 2024 revealed the percentage of Latino tenured and tenure-track faculty has remained stagnant at 10% since 2018.
“I had one to two (Latino) professors during my time at Cal Poly Pomona,” Almusleh said. “A lot of them weren’t bilingual and were honestly white passing with Latino last names.”
CSUs as Hispanic-Serving Institutions
Of the 23 campuses that make up the CSU system, 21 are Hispanic-Serving Institutions, a title designated to universities and colleges with at least 25% total undergraduate Latino student enrollment, according to a CSU fact sheet. Considering many of these campuses are in cities with well-established Latino populations, including CPP and Cal State Los Angeles, the designation can be taken as a purely number-based merit instead of its intended service.
Cal Poly San Luis Obispo reached emerging HSI status after meeting the 25% threshold last year. Meanwhile, 51% of the student population and 76% of the faculty remain predominantly white.
Cecilia Santiago-Gozalez, the associate vice president of Student Success at CPP, is the co-principal investigator of Project CAMINOS. This program, funded by a Title V Developing HSI grant, aims to prepare prospective students from local, Latino-based cities for college by offering guided campus tours and readiness workshops, thus assisting with future enrollment.
“Part of us, being in Pomona, is about supporting some of our local high schools, and for schools to see Cal Poly Pomona as their next destination,” Santiago-Gonzalez said.
Latino faculty disparities between overall faculty members
However, as Latino student enrollment rises, the number of Latino faculty members have not increased to match the student population.
Ever Barraza, the director of undergraduate research and a former CPP Latino alumnus, said this may create overwhelming pressure on existing faculty to mentor Latino students in and outside their own classes.
“Because there are so few of them, a lot of the burden of mentorship or working with students goes on them to make students feel more comfortable,” Barraza said. “So, there’s this kind of cultural taxation that happens as well.”
Between the original Campaign for College Opportunity report published in 2018 and the most recent report in 2024, Latino-tenured faculty dropped from 11% to 10%, and Latino non-tenured faculty dropped from 14% to 12%. According to the same reports, white tenured faculty numbers decreased from 56% to 48%, whereas, white non-tenured faculty numbers increased from 59% to 63%.
These two documents, however, report different categories: in the 2018 report there are two faculty categories – tenured faculty and non-tenured faculty, whereas the 2024 report distinguishes a tenure/tenure-track faculty category and non-tenure-track faculty category. No matter of the difference in categorization, the disparity in Latino faculty numbers compared to other faculty racial/ethnic groups is still present.
Barraza said President Donald Trump’s recent threats to the Department of Education and diversity, equity and inclusion programs may also impact the next generation of Latinos who are considering careers in higher education.
“I think there are more underrepresented, minoritized students who are thinking about getting a Ph.D., but I think the political landscape is very anti-education right now, and I think that’s putting downward pressure where there are even less opportunities,” Barraza said. “The current landscape is pushing back on that momentum of diversifying the doctorate.”
CPP associate professor of urban and regional planning Alvaro Huerta has navigated the systemic underrepresentation in academia for more than a decade. His efforts to promote Latino representation stem from his involvement as the chair of the university’s hiring committee and as an alumnus of UCLA and UC Berkeley.
“Higher education is like mountain climbing,” Huerta said. “The higher you get, the whiter it gets.”
However, Huerta made it clear it would be wrong to assume the hiring committee is solely responsible for this outcome. Proposition 209, aka the California Civil Rights Initiative, was implemented in 1996 as a means to ban preferential treatment in the hiring decision processes.
According to Huerta, institutions must legally comply and incorporate strategies to promote inclusivity. In hiring, Huerta said, racial preference is not the primary cause of the Latino faculty disparity, as it goes against the law. He said the hiring committee cannot hire a Latino faculty member to fulfill diversity goals. Instead, it is up to institutions to promote inclusivity strategies.
According to the most recent Pew Research Center analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data, in 2021, among Latinos over the age of 25, only 7% held a graduate degree. Only 1 in 10 Latinos with a graduate degree, the same report revealed, hold a doctorate degree, a degree most often required for tenured and tenure-track faculty jobs.
As a result, Huerta said he commits to his students in any way he can, as he understands and has lived through shared struggles. Huerta has also observed a lack of commitment to DEI among Latino-tenured faculty, particularly when DEI efforts become performative rather than authentic.
I’ve noticed other faculty of color when I’ve asked, ‘Hey, let’s help out this other person,’” Huerta said. “They’re not interested because they got their position, and then they forget that they once struggled themselves. They completely forget.”
Huerta believes a sense of superiority from being tenured overshadows the responsibility to help mentor others. He also said faculty should be open about their upbringings and communicate opportunities, mentorships and networking tips to aid Latino students seeking advice.
Huerta emphasized the importance of representation in faculty being reflective on student success, noting how students are likely to thrive academically when they see themselves reflected in their faculty members.
“If you’re struggling in school and you cannot identify with your professors, the first person that you should rely on in terms of office hours when you’re struggling, then a lot of times our students don’t show up or they drop out or they get pushed out in that sense,” Huerta said. “So, it does make a big difference.”
Feature image courtesy of Noemi Orozco