Higher education panel pushes for reform

This year’s Race Relations Week branched out Tuesday night to host a talk about access to education for low-income students, an issue that has racial implications but is not defined to race.

The week is a collaborative effort between the Campus Y and student government to discuss important issues involving race on campus and to stimulate dialog.

For Tuesday night’s talk, faculty members and a student discussed problems in the American education system and the obstacles blocking disadvantaged students from pursuing higher education.

“Every human being is entitled to an education,” said Marleny Ruiz, co-chairwoman of Linking Immigrants to New Communities, a Campus Y group that helped sponsor the event.

The panel members encouraged this belief but also focused on the difficulty of attaining higher education for students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds.

The faculty and student panel named factors such as lack of parent motivation, poor teaching, financial issues, low school funding and a general lack of encouragement as the underlying issues.

“It’s the cycle of the home environment, the income, the school environment — who decides to teach there,” said Jessica Hernandez, assistant director in the Office of Undergraduate Admissions.

Tiffany Graves, a first-generation college student and the lone student on the panel, gave a personal account of her experience as a black high school student.

“My parents, neither of them went to college, but they expected me to go to college. Every parent is not like that,” Graves said.

She went on to explain that if the expectations don’t exist, many students are not motivated to get more education.

The general consensus among the panel about educational reform was that the entire system needs to be revamped. This included how funding should be more equally distributed and how teaching as a profession should be more esteemed.

“I think that teaching needs to be viewed as a profession alongside with doctors and lawyers,” said Josmell Perez, multicultural programs coordinator for the Department of Diversity and Multicultural Affairs.

Laura Hamrick, a freshman, said she didn’t know what to expect when she attended, but found the panel and dialogue interesting.

Alyzza Dill, the co-chairwoman of Helping Youth by Providing Enrichment, another Campus Y group that hosted the event, said she hopes students who attended the panel will take what they learned and apply it to community service projects.

The panel ended with a call for students to take action with Carolina College Advising Corps, which sends UNC graduates to North Carolina high schools to review college applications.

This project is designed to encourage low-income high school students who would be first-generation college students to pursue a degree in higher education.



Contact the University Editor at udesk@unc.edu.