CSM as a Hispanic Serving Institution
These federal grants fund innovative centers and programs that benefit all students
"CSM is really committed to creating a socially just campus where everyone feels like they belong."
– Heidi Pereira, assistant project director of Title V grant programs
Some of College of San Mateo’s signature learning resources are funded by a federal program to enhance schools with a large Hispanic enrollment. With 29.6 percent Hispanic/Latinx students as of 2018-19, CSM is proud to be a Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI). The innovative resources CSM builds with its millions in HSI grants, including its Math Resource Center and Integrated Science Center, nurture and support all its students.
HSI funding is an outgrowth of the federal Higher Education Act of 1965, part of President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society domestic agenda. As such, it’s part of the midcentury fluorescence of public investment that built CSM’s College Heights campus itself. A subsection of the law benefits colleges with at least 25 percent Hispanic enrollment. (Johnson’s alma mater, Texas State University, was one of America’s first HSIs.)
These competitive grants go to schools, not individuals, says Heidi Pereira, assistant project director of CSM’s Title V grant programs. The idea is that colleges with better resources will graduate more students, and that these graduates will be better prepared for university transfer and for whatever life may bring. Many schools with high Hispanic enrollment are under-resourced, so the HSI grants help level the playing field.
In 2017, Pereira joined the team administering CSM’s first HSI grant, a $5 million award over five years that helped renovate the Integrated Science Center. It is one of the largest grants that CSM has ever received. In addition to new computers, flooring and electrical work, this HSI grant supports STEM workshops and tutoring for all students, professional development for faculty, and a textbook loan program. It helped CSM’s astronomy department develop its new Associate in Science degree, which prepares students for transfer into university astrophysics and related programs, as well as its Associate of Arts in astronomy, a more liberal arts-oriented program suited to future science teachers. The grant also supports CSM’s chapter of the Puente Project, a Latinx-oriented learning community founded in 1981 at UC Berkeley.
In 2021, Charlene Frontiera, CSM’s Dean of Math and Sciences, followed this success by obtaining a $3 million HSI grant for more kinds of programs—not just STEM—that will bring the campus $600,000 every year for five years.
For Pereira, herself a first-generation college student who moved here from Guatemala at age 8, helping manage CSM’s HSI funds is a chance to “go back and give back and help students navigate.
“For Latinx students, the biggest challenge, especially for STEM majors, is impostor syndrome,” Pereira says. “They feel intimidated. They think, ‘I don’t know if I’m good enough; I don’t know if I belong here.’”
“The truth is, CSM is really committed to creating a socially just campus where everyone feels like they belong. Where everyone feels like they’re an integral part of the campus.”
A prime goal of HSI funding nationally is to shrink the degree-attainment gap between white and Latinx students. Nationally, according to Edexcelencia.org, Latinx students graduate from community colleges at a rate two percentage points lower than their white peers—33 percent and 35 percent, respectively. That gap widens to 12 percent at four-year colleges and universities: 51 percent and 63 percent.
Accordingly, CSM works hard to bring university success into reach. In addition to Puente, its HSI-supported programs include MESA (Mathematics, Engineering and Science Achievement), which offers a wide range of support services including Math and Science Jams, internships and scholarships, a student center, workshops on transfer and on academic excellence, and both live and virtual tutoring. As with other HSI-funded offerings, MESA programs welcome all students on campus.
