Written by Monique Posadas

In the Wake of Crisis

With the backdrop of post-pandemic lockdowns and in the thick of market destabilization, University of California (UC) Academic Student Employees went on the nation’s largest ever higher education academic workers strike to demand improved contracts.  Though the UC and the United Auto Workers (UAW), the union representing the student employees, have reached a tentative agreement for the postdoctoral scholars and academic researchers, they have yet to come to an arrangement with the Teaching Assistants, who make up 67% of the bargaining unit (The Regents of the University of California, 2022).

The UC system is among the largest employers in the state of California (2022 State of California) and the outcome of this strike will likely set a precedent for graduate education across the country.

It is imperative that we understand why this large number of graduate students across the UC system are disgruntled, and how to meet the challenge of creating better systems for their success.

Not a New Problem

It is apparent that crises expose weakness and flaws in any system, and the historic UC academic workers strike is no exception. Weaknesses in graduate education are revealed by the CGU/GRE Survey of Graduate Enrollment and Degrees, which tells us that national graduate student attrition rates consistently hover around 50% and the total of doctoral degrees awarded in 2019-20 decreased by 7% (Zhou & Gao, 2021). Approximately 44% of graduate students complete their degree in seven years (Council of Graduate Schools, 2008). Though these statistics are disturbing, they are not new, and they have an even greater negative impact on under-represented groups, including the Latina/e/o/x graduate student population.

The Latina/e/o/x population has shown tremendous growth within the United States, reaching 58 million in 2016 (Flores, 2017). Yet, research conducted in 2006 by Perez-Huber, Huidor, Malagon, Sanchez, and Solórzano, then replicated in 2015 by Perez-Huber, Malagón, Ramirez, Gonzalez, Jimenez, and Vélez, illustrates that less than 1% of Latina/e/o/x students attain a doctorate. The leaks throughout the educational pipeline bring us to this sad social and systemic reality. Every segment of the pipeline, from TK to terminal graduate degrees, plays an integral role in how and why Latina/e/o/x students make it to their educational goals. For more discussion on the numbers, see DiMaria’s October article on HSIs (2022) and College President Mellander’s December 2022 article on Hispanics and the PhD.

Bridging Theory and Practice: A New Lens for Improving Graduate Students’ Success

The strike triggered underlying issues in graduate education that have been so often discussed and studied, but remain unresolved. There is no one “right way” to improve graduate education’s crisis. Instead, if we understand it as a web of care and collaborations, then we can create a healthy and robust educational ecosystem that helps students to feel like they belong.

Quintanilla, Gonzalez, Southern, & Smith (2007) use Bronfenbrenner’s (1979) Ecological Model to understand Hispanics’ graduate education as a web of microsystems, mesosystems, exosystems, and macrosystems. They define the microsystem as the self, composed of the spirit, body, and mind. The mesosystem comprises the family, and includes spouses/significant others, children, and family origin. The exosystem is a community web, which incorporates work, peer, and school. The macrosystem is the outermost system of culture - socio-economics, media, and traditions. In thinking about graduate education as an ecological system, we can consider the web of networks on and off campus that can feed into graduate student success. Despite this framework’s specific application to Hispanic student populations, this model can be applied to graduate populations more generally.

According to O’Meara, Griffin, Kuvaeva, Nyunt, and Robinson, a student’s sense of belonging is a “feeling of connectedness and belief that one is important and matters to others in an organization” (2017). Commonly a theory reserved for undergraduate student populations, these researchers explored how the sense of belonging impacts graduate student populations. They found that, just like undergraduate students, an increased sense of belonging at an institution increases graduate student retention and overall success. They found that the ecosystem of the campus plays an important role in cultivating this sense of belonging, which is the same throughline as the Hispanic Collegiate Ecological Model.

My role as a Graduate Student Mentorship Program Coordinator at an R1 Hispanic Serving Institution, is to lower graduate student attrition (especially among the most vulnerable populations) by connecting first-year students to campus resources, peer, and faculty mentors, among other things. I spoke to a fourth-year doctoral student to understand how he understands graduate student support at his home institution, and he said, “graduate students are like broken, discarded, and mismatched furniture” (Anonymous, 2022). His sense of graduate student care was that of neglect and graduate students being an afterthought. At the core, this observation is echoed by striking students across the UC system.

Grad education has been in crisis for some time and the strike is forcing us to look at and address gaps in graduate ecology. If we see graduate education through the lens of the graduate ecological model and sense of belonging, then it becomes clearer that no matter one’s positionality, we can all impact graduate student success. Love (2019) argues that spaces of learning should be liberatory environments and it can be where marginalized and minoritized students of color don’t just survive but thrive. The web of ecology can point to where, if at all, graduate studies can provide support to graduate students, so they are safe and nurtured to embark on brave exploratory journeys. 

References

Bronfenbrenner, U. (1979). The ecology of human development. Harvard University Press.

Council of Graduate Schools. (2008). Ph.D. completion and attrition: Analysis of baseline program data from the Ph.D. completion project. Washington, DC: Author.

DiMaria, F. (2022). HSIs and eHSIs 101. In the Hispanic Outlook on Education Magazine. October. https://www.hispanicoutlook.com/articles/hsis-and-ehsis-101. Accessed on Dec. 15, 2022.

Flores, A. (2017). How the US Hispanic population is changing. Pew Research Center, 18.

Love, B.L. (2019). We want to do more than survive: Abolitionist teaching and the pursuit of educational freedom. Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon Press.

Mellander, G.A. (2022). Hispanics and PhDs. In the Hispanic Outlook on Education Magazine. December. https://www.hispanicoutlook.com/articles/hispanics-and-phds. Accessed on Dec. 15, 2022.

O'Keeffe, P. (2013). A sense of belonging: Improving student retention. College Student Journal, 47(4), 605-613.

O’Meara, K. A., Griffin, K. A., Kuvaeva, A., Nyunt, G., & Robinson, T. (2017). Sense of belonging and its contributing factors in graduate education. International Journal of Doctoral Studies, 12.

Pérez Huber, L.,  Huidor, O.,  Malagón, M.C., Sánchez, G., & Solórzano, D.G. (2006). Falling through the Cracks: Critical Transitions in the Latina/o Educational Pipeline: 2006 Latina/o Education Summit Report. UCLA Chicano Studies Resource Center Research Report. (No. 7) March.

Perez Huber, L., Malagón, M. C., Ramirez, B. R., Gonzalez, L. C., Jimenez, A., & Vélez, V. N. (2015). Still Falling through the Cracks: Revisiting the Latina/o Education Pipeline. CSRC Research Report. Number 19. UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center.

Quintanilla, Y.T., Gonzalez, N., Southern, S., & Smith, R. L. (2007). An Ecological Model for Hispanic Student Success in Graduate Education. In The International Journal of Learning, 13(10), 125–136.

The Regents of the University of California. Information about UC-UAW negotiations and a UAW strike. https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/UAW#offers. Accessed December 14, 2022.

2022 State of California. Data Axle. https://labormarketinfo.edd.ca.gov/majorer/countymajorer.asp?CountyCode=000099. Accessed Dec 14, 2022.

Zhou, E., & Gao, J. (2021). Graduate enrollment and degrees: 2010 to 2020. Washington, DC: Council of Graduate Schools.

Author Bio:

Monique Posadas, M.A., is the Graduate Student Mentorship Program Coordinator at the University of California, Riverside and a Doctoral Student at Claremont Graduate University. She serves on the AAHHE Board of Directors as the Graduate Student Member at Large (2021-2024). (mposadas@ucr.edu | 951-827-3386)