It’s not unexpected that policies and practices aimed at higher education diversity take a lower profile than usual when college administrators have to manage budget cuts and rising tuitions. Nonetheless, a coalition of western states is seeking to make sure diversity and equity remain high priorities for their higher education systems in the coming years. 

The Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education (WICHE) and the University of Southern California’s Center for Urban Education (CUE) are partnering to make equity a state policy issue and improve policies using data to measure the success of underrepresented students at their institutions.

“During difficult financial times, concerns for equity get lost,” said WICHE President David Longanecker. “It’s easy to get consumed with fiscal distress and essentially lose focus on the important goal that all our citizens get an equal chance at a decent life.”

The project, which has won funding from the Ford Foundation, will use CUE’s action-oriented research and data tools to disaggregate data, analyze it, and strategize about specific interventions that will help increase college completion. WICHE, a regional coordinating organization that facilitates cooperation among western state higher education systems, represents 15 states from Alaska in the north, south to Hawaii and east to Colorado.

National goals to increase college completion rates by year 2020 have heightened the urgency in the western U.S. where minority population growth has outpaced policy changes at the state level.

To meet President Barack Obama’s college completion challenge, WICHE states will have to confer in the coming decade more than 2 million additional degrees over what had been projected prior to Obama’s challenge, according to data presented by CUE co-director Dr. Estela Bensimon. The western state share of additional degree completion is a quarter of that needed for the U.S. to meet the 2020 degree completion goal.