Pullias Center Team Keeps Focus on Empowering Men of Color

The Men of Color study is going strong more than two years after receiving a grant to research best practices for improving college persistence and graduation rates for minority men.

The Pullias Center news story announcing that a $300k grant from ECMC Foundation would be put towards the new Men of Color study ran in December 2018.  It highlighted that the Pullias Center’s director, William G. Tierney, and a relative newcomer to USC, Provost Postdoctoral Scholar Adrian Huerta, would be leads on the project. In the time since, Tierney has retired and Huerta has taken lead on the study while advancing into the roles of a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Education and associated faculty member at the Pullias Center.

“There are many small programs on higher education campuses focused on helping men of color that have been generating big returns in measures beyond simply retention and persistence,” notes Huerta.  “The Men of Color study was created to address the lack of prior systematic data collection to see how programs like these are working and how they can improve. This had to go beyond collecting stats and surveys to instead dig deeper on several levels across all stakeholder groups including faculty and administrators.”

To that end, the study’s team of 7 researchers conducted over 150 interviews from first-time freshmen to university provosts at multiple California State University campuses. They looked at how effective programs have been in supporting male students of color while also evaluating other components such as cost-effectiveness, scalability, and institutional investment.

The study is currently in the coding and analysis stage. Huerta recently led an Empowering Men of Color webinar to share some very preliminary findings. The event was co-sponsored with the past President of ACPA and attended by an estimated 215+ professionals from across a range of K-12 systems, higher education institutions, and non-profits, with nearly 85% of participants indicating they will use a practice from the webinar on their own campuses.

“It’s great to reach a point in the project that is starting to have an impact, even though there is still a great deal of post-interview work to be done,” shares Huerta. Where and how the final research will be presented is currently to be determined.  “We had a few events on our radar for this fall where we could have shared our findings, but that was all upended by the pandemic,” he admits.

In the meantime, the outbreak of the coronavirus will likely require some rethinking of the study’s timelines as campuses remain closed.  Fortunately primary data collection is complete for this phase.  In the midst of the crisis, the Pullias Center was awarded a COVID-19 Rapid Response Small Grant from ECMC Foundation to help support the students involved in the study.

Visit the Men of Color Study page for the latest updates on this project.