By Tabari Morris
The Board of Trustees is scheduled to review and update the 2025–28 Equity Plan with the goal of addressing the persistent achievement gaps experienced by Black and African American students and Latinx students in college-level math, English coursework and transfer rates.
The new Equity Plan aims to analyze data on campus to identify students who face the greatest challenges in terms of educational equity. According to Chancellor Kimberlee Messina, every metric revealed large discrepancies in terms of students who were either Black, African American or Latinx in terms of completing degrees and first-year coursework.
The key areas in which the plan concentrates are improving rates of persistence, retention and helping students master college-level math and English within the first year of college. More funds are expected to be allocated to populations with the biggest equity gaps in these areas.
“What it really does is show our data and then show our plan for how we want to hopefully eliminate those equity gaps. What we found in almost every one of those markers is that our Black, African-American and our Latinx students had the greatest gaps. That’s the population we’re really looking at… it talks about things like persistence, retention, completing college-level math and English in the first year, and degree completion or transfer. Those are the markers,” Chancellor Kimberlee Messina said.
Heather McCarty added, “As a board, we have been pushing and advocating for hiring internal legal counsel, which we are in the process of doing at this point in time. No one wants to spend more money on legal fees—everyone wants that money to go to students instead. So we are trying to reign that in and get that out.”
The Board is to formally examine and potentially modify the Equity Plan during its next scheduled meeting. Any updates to the plan are expected to be posted shortly for community comment.