By Adolfo Guzman-Lopez, laist, June 20, 2019.
For Native American college students, the road to earning a college degree can be a rocky, lonely pursuit.
Only about 1,100 of the 280,000 students enrolled in the entire 10-campus University of California system in 2018 were Native Americans — that's 0.4 percent. And the overall Native American enrollment was only about 100 students more than 20 years ago; during that same span, the UC system added 100,000 students. The relatively few Native American enrollees are 11 percent less likely than all other students to earn a degree within six years.
It's no better at the Cal State system. Out of nearly 90,000 freshmen who entered a CSU in the fall of 2018, only 166 were Native American — that's less than 0.2 percent. Those students earned their degrees at the same rate as their UC peers.
Advocates say that lack of representation — almost to the point of invisibility — and a lack of support can help to explain the dire statistics of Native Americans in higher education. They say the state has a responsibility to make public higher education accessible to all students, but with Native Americans, there's a heavier debt.
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