OPINION
PHOTO BY FABIAN RUBIO
BY JOSHUA BIRAGBARA
HOW LBSU FAILED
RECRUITING BLACK STUDENTS
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alking into class, 21-year-old Public Relations major Trinity Beasley notices something vastly different between her and her classmates. “I see two to three other Black students in all of my classes,” she said. Beasley attends Long Beach State University, which is known to be a diverse campus with Hispanic/Latinx students making up 46.1% of the student body population and Asian students making up 20.7%, according to LBSU’s Latinx Faculty & Staff Association. Despite these numbers, one demographic remains noticeably minute, that being the Black population who consists only 3.8% of the student body population despite making 13% of the City of Long Beach’s population. For some
reason, the school has failed to attract Black students as opposed to other minority racial and ethnic demographics. Black representation in all areas of life came to the forefront in the post-George Floyd era, especially in the field of education. For the dearth of Black students at LBSU, specifically, Africana Studies assistant professor Keith Claybrook discussed the reasons behind this dilemma and the solutions that come with it. “There’s three [important] reasons for that, I think,” Dr. Claybrook explained. “One of them is the perception of Cal State Long Beach in the Black community at large, [in the past] the buzz was that Greater Los Angeles area Black students wanted to go to Long Beach,
Northridge and San Diego State. But the buzz now is that Cal State Long Beach is not welcoming. So that feeling that not being welcome is a major obstacle now,” he said. Dr. Claybrook also believes that poor outreach efforts by the university have been a factor. “Traditionally, Long Beach reached out to local high schools and did the generic ‘Hey, come to Long Beach’ spiel. But I’m not aware that there’s any high schools that are predominantly Black anymore. Milikan, Jordan, Poly and even St. Anthony [High Schools] look very different now. So, if we want to increase Black student enrollment, then we can’t have a generic going-to-a-high school campaign. We need to be more targeted to the Black Student Unions at
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