COSTA MESA : Helping to Breach Gap at College

When Cheryl Jupiter walked onto Orange Coast College campus this year, she found a racially mixed student body, an almost all-white faculty and a communication gap.

Jupiter, 34, the college’s first black counselor, also knew that too few of the minority students would go on to four-year universities. And therein lay some of the new counselor’s challenges.

“It used to be the kiss of death if you were black or Latino to go to a community college,” Jupiter said, because so few went on to four-year colleges. “That’s how bad it was for them. Now we’re going to turn that around.”

This year, Orange Coast College hired not only Jupiter but Mary Jacobs, who is a counselor and an American Indian, to contact high school students about the college and to help current students meet university requirements to eventually transfer. They and three other minority staff members also are trying to recruit more minority teachers and employees.

Jupiter, who holds degrees from UC Irvine and Cal State Long Beach, said she found that not only students needed their guidance, but that teachers also needed help communicating with students from different ethnic backgrounds.

“I really was concerned because it’s not the same as when a lot of these people (teachers) started here,” she said. “ We have different cultures and different values, and they have to deal with that.”

Jupiter plans to hold a workshop in January to help teachers communicate with minority students. One of the problems she encountered was that teachers didn’t realize that students from some cultures avoided eye contact to show respect. Another teacher wondered why one of his Asian students bowed when he nodded his head. She explained to him that the student was acknowledging the teacher’s authority.

Jupiter’s efforts also are aimed at increasing the number of minority students on campus and then getting them into four-year colleges and universities. Although she does not know the numbers, Jupiter said minorities largely do not go on to receive bachelor’s degrees.

“One of OCC’s claims to fame is that they have the most student transfers to the California State University system, but the minorities are not transferring,” she said.

The problem is magnified by the fact that 85% of all minority college students attend community colleges, a state study found.

In the Coast Community College District, which includes the Orange Coast campus, 24% of the students are minorities, said Jorge Sanchez, director of research.

One way to keep those students in school, Jupiter said, is to make the campus more hospitable. This year, she and students revived the campus’s Black Student Union, which had been dormant for years.

For James Cephas, a 20-year-old black engineering student in his second year at the college, that made a difference. This year, he said, the climate on campus is friendlier than last.

“Not that many people spoke to me,” he said. “Everybody was in their own world.”

That kind of climate, with few support groups for minorities, can make a college campus a threatening place despite strong academic programs, Jupiter said.