Posts Tagged: graduation
UC Davis Entomology Graduate: A Kindergarten Dream Comes True
If a picture is worth a thousand words, then this image of a jumping-for-joy entomology graduate...
This image of UC Davis entomology graduate RJ Millena shows her jumping for joy while wielding an insect net. (Photo by Kaylee Fagan)
This insect-themed graduation cap is in the running for UC Davis prizes. RJ Millena's first project involved the California pipevine swallowtail (Battus philenor). See caterpillar.(Photo by Kaylee Fagan)
Strawberries, succulents and saplings make unique ‘living diplomas’
Reposted from UC Berkeley News
For UC Berkeley students graduating with a degree in conservation and resource studies, a paper diploma just won't do.
At a special alternative graduation ceremony held in Tilden Regional Park on Sunday, graduates of the Conservation and Resource Studies program instead each received a plant — an oak sapling, a strawberry plant, a pot of buckwheat grass or even a succulent — lovingly collected and cultivated by younger students.
These “living diplomas,” part of a nearly 50-year-old tradition in the program, symbolize the graduates' ongoing growth as they explore the world beyond Berkeley.
“This is our form of love and remembrance and connection to our cohort, to past cohorts and to the future,” said graduating senior Tanya Hanson during a speech on Sunday.
“We hope that they take the diplomas and plant them or take care of them,” added Leah Jones, another new graduate. “The vision is that they will grow with the plant.”
![Skye Michel hands a small potted plant to a student in front of balloon banners during the alternative graduation ceremony](https://news.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/20190519_AltGraduation_bhs_027_BN.jpg)
Skye Michel hands a living diploma to a student during the Conservation and Resources Studies program's alternative graduation ceremony in Tilden Park last Sunday. (UC Berkeley photo by Brittany Hosea-Small)
The tradition harkens back to the founding of the conservation and resource studies major in 1970. At the time, deforestation was a major issue facing California and the rest of the world, and students graduating from the new program were irked by the idea of having a paper diploma as a final symbol of their time at Berkeley.
“People were very aware of the role that the paper industry had in [deforestation], especially locally, so they said, ‘We're not going to support that — we want not to have a dead tree, but a living plant,'” said Ignacio Chapela, a faculty adviser for the program and an associate professor of environmental science, policy and management at Berkeley.
Organized in its entirety by students, the graduation event embodies the freedom and inclusivity of the major itself: There is no cost, no dress code and no limit on the number of guests each graduate can invite. Anyone is free to speak and perform, and food and decorations are either donated by, or sourced from, local sustainable businesses.
The event “embodies the emphasis that CRS (conservation and resource studies) puts on building a cohort and establishing a community,” said Skye Michel, a junior who is president of the Conservation and Resource Studies Student Organization (CRSSO), which runs the event each year. “It's meant to be a way to celebrate everyone that's been involved in the educational and personal growth of the CRS individuals.”
![Tanya Hanson (left), Skye Michel and Leah Jones stand at a pedestal at the CRS alternative graduation ceremony](https://news.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/20190519_AltGraduation_bhs_007_BN.jpg)
Tanya Hanson (left), Skye Michel and Leah Jones give the opening speech at the ceremony. (UC Berkeley photo by Brittany Hosea-Small)
This year, the alternative graduation ceremony drew around 200 people to a muddy meadow at Tilden Park, part of the East Bay Regional Park District. Friends and family danced barefoot to Inspector Gadje Balkan Brass, a horn and percussion ensemble from San Francisco, and feasted on local food and drink from Trader Joe's, Acme Bread, House Kombucha, Lagunitas Brewing Company and Mixing Bowl Catering, all while dodging intermittent downpours.
Following the picnic and dancing, the crowd gathered for the ceremony, which comprised speeches from and performances by students and faculty, followed by the awarding of the living diplomas.
“[Living diplomas] very much represent the ethos of the students in the major, in that their work in the world is alive and vibrant and is something tender that needs to be cultivated,” said Erica Bree Rosenblum, an associate professor of environmental studies, policy and management and a faculty adviser in the Conservation and Resource Studies program. “To me, it's a much more apt symbol for college graduation than a piece of paper.”
With a limited budget, the students sometimes have to get scrappy to gather enough living diplomas to go around. This year's crop included California buckwheat donated by a student who grew it as part of a research project, strawberry plants originally cultivated for an unrelated fundraiser, and succulents, given to Jones by a friend.
“Last year, we had this grass that had yellow flowers, and it was really pretty, but this year, I like the diversity of the different plants,” said Hanson, CRSSO co-vice president.
![Small plants in hand-painted pots sit on a table at the CRS alternative graduation](https://news.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/20190519_AltGraduation_bhs_001_BN.jpg)
Pots of plants that will be given as living diplomas wait on a table before the ceremony begins. (UC Berkeley photo by Brittany Hosea-Small)
Some students who participated in CRSSO's “Adopt-a-Senior” program, in which a younger student forms a mentorship relationship with an older student, grew their own plants from seeds. Junior Chris McCarron grew type of shrub called a snowdrop bush for his senior and a five-fingered fern for a friend's senior.
“I grow a lot of California natives, and it's very important to me that people (are) given plants that fit them,” McCarron said.
Chapela also chipped in by growing 12 oak saplings from acorns that he collected in Sonoma County and the Sierra Nevada — six of which he cultivated outside his office in a corrugated metal box, built to protect them against a local squirrel.
At the ceremony, Chapela read off the graduates' names, while younger students eagerly lined up with plants in hand to pass on to the seniors.
Hanson, a first-generation college graduate who plans to apply to law school, received one of Chapela's oak saplings — and she knows exactly what she's going to do with it.
“My mom's house has a 300-year-old oak tree,” Hanson said. “I want to plant mine next to it.”
![A group shot of the 2019 CRS grads at alternative graduation](https://news.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/20190519_AltGraduation_bhs_031_BN.jpg)
The joyful, 55-member graduating class — holding the potted plants that are their living diplomas — poses for a group photo, along with several family members, classmates and friends. (UC Berkeley photo by Brittany Hosea-Small)
UCR Identified as National Leader for Latino Student Success
RIVERSIDE, Calif. — The University of California, Riverside has been listed among ten top-performing colleges nationally for Latino student success according to findings released today in Washington, D.C.
The Education Trust, a non-profit think tank based in Washington D.C., looked at 613 public and private four-year colleges nationwide and singled out ten campuses nationwide as models for promoting Latino student success. Rather than ranking schools strictly on national averages, The Education Trust compared institutions of similar size, SAT scores, and number of Pell Grant recipients and then highlighted those campuses with significantly higher than average graduation rates among Latino students. The findings are published in, “A Look at Latino Student Success: Identifying Top- and Bottom-Performing Institutions.
UCR is widely respected as a national model for student success across ethnic and economic categories. According to the most recent national data, the six-year graduation rate for Latino students in the U.S. is 54 percent. The rate at UCR is nearly 20 percentage points higher at 73 percent.
In addition to performing higher than national averages, UCR is one of few institutions nationwide to have eliminated achievement gaps across ethnic groups and income levels. In 2016, the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities honored UCR with the prestigious “Project Degree Completion Award” for innovation in improving student success.
“Being named a top-performing institution is a testament not only to our students but also to the faculty and staff across campus dedicated to helping our students succeed,” said UCR Chancellor Kim A. Wilcox. “The disparities in student success are a national crisis in higher education in the U.S. The Education Trust's analysis is critical in identifying the schools like UCR that are moving the needle on graduation rates so that our successes can be emulated across the country.”
In March, The Education Trust released a similar report covering African American student success. UCR was one of just three schools to be named top-performing institutions in both reports.
Founded in the early 1990s, The Education Trust is a national non-profit advocacy organization that promotes academic achievement for students at all levels of the education system, particularly for students of color and low-income students.
Source: Published originally on ucrtoday.ucr.edu, UCR Identified as National Leader for Latino Student Success, by John Replogle, December 14, 2017.
New report reveals surprising facts about Hispanic children and teens
Child Trends, the non-partisan, non-profit research organization, analyzed a wealth of recent Census data regarding the country's 17.5 million Hispanic children and teens, and the group identified some surprising facts.
The vast majority of Hispanic children in 2013 – more than 90 percent — were born in the U.S. Most of those children had family connections to Mexico, and the rest were connected to Puerto Rico, followed by El Salvador, the Dominican Republic, Cuba and other countries in Central America, and South America.
A majority of Hispanic children — 58 percent — live with two married parents. Latino children are more likely than their white or black counterparts to eat a meal with their families six or seven days in a week. And those meals are more likely to be home-cooked in Hispanic households, compared to meals eaten in black and white households, according to the report.
Sixty-two percent of Hispanic children are considered low income, living in families that earn just enough money to cover basic needs, the report said. Roughly one out of every three Hispanic children meets the federal definition of poor, compared with 38 percent of black children and 11 percent of white children, researchers at Child Trends found.
Hispanic parents are less likely to read to their babies and toddler than parents of white children, and Hispanic children are not adequately prepared when they start school, the report found. But there has been a recent jump in enrollment in early childhood education programs among Hispanic children, from 39 percent in 2007 to 52 percent in 2012.
And, as a group, Hispanic students are making gains, though they lag behind their white peers. Twenty-one percent of Hispanic eighth graders were proficient in federally administered math tests in 2013, a leap from eight percent in 2000. The on-time high school graduation rate for Hispanics also has surged, and college enrollment is at an all-time high. But Hispanics lagged behind whites and blacks in college completion in 2013.
One area where Hispanics outpaced other racial or ethnic groups is in smartphone use. In 2012, 43 percent of Hispanic teens between 12 and 17 owned a smartphone, compared to 35 percent of whites and 40 percent of blacks in the same age group. More white teenagers owned cell phones, followed by black teens and then Hispanics.
Source: Published originally on The Washington Post as New report reveals surprising facts about Hispanic children and teens by Lyndsey Laytom, September 24, 2014.
Latino college completion rates low despite enrollment
The gap dropped to 9 percent in 2014 from 14 percent in 2012 among those who entered college as first time, full-time undergraduates, according to the report.
But it's a different story when part-time students, which account for almost half of Hispanic students, are included. In California, home to the largest number of the country's Hispanics, only 15 percent of Latino students completed their undergraduate degree or certificate in the year 2010-11. In Texas, the number was 17 percent.
Low rates of college completion - especially at the community college level- do not just affect Hispanics. The difference is that in most states, there is still a very big gap between the number of Hispanic adults holding a degree compared to the rest of the population.
At East Los Angeles College in California, about 24,000 Latino students enrolled in the year 2011-12, but only about 1,000 completed their Associate Degree that year. And although California has the highest number of Latinos, not one of its colleges were in the top five institutions awarding associate or bachelor's degrees to Latinos.
Low rates of college completion - especially at the community college level- do not just affect Hispanics. In Texas, when part-time students are taken into account, only 18 percent of non-Latino whites obtained a degree in 2010-11 academic year.
The difference is that in most states, there is still a very big gap between the number of Hispanic adults holding a degree compared to the rest of the population. Nationally, only twenty percent of Latino adults have a postsecondary degree, compared to 36 percent of all U.S. adults. In California, only 16 percent of Latino adults over 25 have an associate or bachelor's degree, compared to 38 percent of all adults in that age group. In Texas, it's 16 percent of Hispanics who hold a degree, compared to 32 percent of total adults those ages.
At the same time, more and more Hispanic children are entering the nation's schools. In California, Hispanic students make up over half of the K-12 population; in Texas, it's about half. At the national level, 22 percent of children in K-12 are Hispanic.
Source: Originally published on nbcnews.com as Latino College Completion Rates Low Despite EnrollmentBy Sandra Lilley, April 15, 2014.