UA, ASU Join New Alliance of Hispanic Serving Research Universities​

TUCSON, AZ —The University of Arizona and Arizona State University will be part of a new 20-school alliance that hopes to increase educational opportunities for Hispanic students, the new group announced Thursday.

The Alliance of Hispanic Serving Research Universities has the key goals of doubling the member institutions' Hispanic doctoral student enrollment by 2030 and increasing the number of Hispanic faculty members by 20 percent during that same timeframe.

The alliance includes every university that has been both classified as R1 — which indicates a school has high research activity — and designated as a Hispanic-Serving Institution (HSI).

The HSI designation from the U.S. Department of Education is for schools where the enrollment of Hispanic undergraduate students is at least 25 percent of the overall student body.

UA was designated as an HSI school in 2018, though ASU announced its HSI designation earlier on Thursday.

UA currently ranks No. 7 out of 384 institutions in awarding doctoral degrees to Hispanic and Latino students, according to the National Science Foundation's latest survey of earned doctorates.

"The University of Arizona has a strong foundation for conferring doctorates to Hispanic students, and this collaboration will ensure we can build upon that foundation and go even further with our impact," University of Arizona President Robert Robbins said. "In partnership with other R1 HSIs, we have the research and institutional capacity and leadership to make an intentional difference."

The member institutions in the new alliance come from nine states and had a total of 766,718 students enrolled in the fall of 2020. Of that total, 33 percent were Hispanic, the group said.

Meanwhile, the combined research spending of the 20 universities totaled more than $5.9 billion, according to the National Science Foundation's 2020 Higher Education Research and Development Survey.

From 2019-20, the alliance universities awarded 11,027 doctoral degrees, 13 percent of them to Hispanic students.

"With Hispanics making up less than 6 percent of U.S. doctoral students, we must be intentional about creating opportunities for Hispanics," said Michael Amiridis, the outgoing chancellor of the University of Illinois Chicago. "We believe this alliance will make rapid progress in advancing Hispanic student enrollment in doctoral programs and broadening pathways to the professoriate by building on our strength as Hispanic-serving research universities."

Though the alliance was formally announced on Thursday, the schools said they already have been working together on several initiatives, including supporting more Ph.D. students in Latino humanities studies and expanding opportunities for Hispanic students in computer science.

"By improving Hispanic representation in academia, this alliance will change the face of higher education," said Kim Wilcox, chancellor of the University of California, Riverside.

The 20 schools that are part of the Alliance of Hispanic Serving Research Universities are:

• Arizona State University
• City University of New York Graduate Center
• Florida International University
• Texas Tech University
• The University of New Mexico
• The University of Texas at Arlington
• The University of Texas at Austin
• The University of Texas at El Paso
• The University of Texas at San Antonio
• University of Arizona
• University of California, Irvine
• University of California, Riverside
• University of California, Santa Barbara
• University of California, Santa Cruz
• University of Central Florida
• University of Colorado, Denver
• University of Houston
• University of Illinois Chicago
• University of Nevada, Las Vegas
• University of North Texas