A kaleidoscope is a childhood toy tube that uses mirrors to turn small colored objects into beautiful random patterns.
Cal State Long Beach’s annual Kaleidoscope extravaganza employs the toy concept as a metaphor to provide children and families an opportunity to see how our university gives back to our diverse and interconnected global communities.
It is not merely a day of fun and games, but a brief period of introspection on how to improve educational access for all youth.
The optimistic outcome is that we can plant seeds in children’s minds that education is the ultimate key to making the world a better place, so they will strive to pursue higher learning.
This should also be a time when community leaders direct an intensified focus on developing successful strategies to attract and retain college students who may historically fall through the cracks and never make it to the podium.
Among the problems our society – and consequently our economic planners – must work on is getting minority children from kindergarten to college graduation.
A study last year by the Pew Hispanic Center showed that the completion rates of Latino students at public, four-year universities in the U.S. was 57 percent, compared to an 81 percent success rate among white college students.
Of the approximately 150,000 bachelor’s degrees awarded in California in the academic year 2005-2006, only 15 percent went to Latino students.
A report in the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education (JBHE) indicated that only 42 percent of African-American college students in the national arenas earned bachelor’s degrees in 2006. While those figures were up three percentage points from 2004, our institutions fall far short of claiming victory.
California’s and the country’s future economic health will critically depend on improving those numbers.
Many educational policies and tactics need to be restructured and fine-tuned to improve achievement ratios.
Things that can be done should be done, but innovation will involve investing more resources.
A recent legislative forum at the UC Riverside focused on ways to improve Latino success beginning at earlier stages of education, according to an article in The Press-Enterprise.
The ideas that emerged were to better train K-12 educators to tailor curriculum for Spanish-speaking students who are learning English and to expand the diversity of university senior faculty.
The JBHE report identifies difficulties “primarily caused by inferior K-12 preparation and an absence of a family college tradition” as a cause of low success rates.
Both studies show that not enough financial resources are provided to help solve systemic failures.
It’s obvious there is no catchall solution to increasing minority college completion. Improvement will depend on dedicated current and future educators working together to help youngsters become successful and productive citizens.
Outreach is crucial to attracting the children visiting our campus, but getting them to the university is only half the battle. Getting sheepskins in the hands of more minority students is the other half.
Most economic, political, educational and sociological experts agree that our economy will thrive only if our colleges deliver a highly educated workforce across the spectrum.
Delivering high-quality education to children of all colors and ethnicities equally would complete the metaphor of our Kaleidoscope.
