Embracing our Identity as a Hispanic-Serving Institution

At Rutgers-Newark, we encourage all members of our community not to check their identities at the door. Our inspirational Strategic Plan and Diversity Strategic Plan provide us frameworks for weaving perspectives and experiences into our high-impact scholarship and curriculum across the disciplines that deepen our appreciation of each other’s cultures while also demonstrating our interdependence. See our array of undergraduate and graduate programs, and examples below of special academic opportunities.

• Our Honors Living-Learning Community is considered a national model, with breathtaking diversity and a curriculum integrating social justice into any major
• Lives in Translation provides avenues for students to leverage their multilingualism academically and through community engagement.
• Rutgers-Newark is a state-wide hub for diversifying STEM fields and professions, including pathways from 5 HSI community colleges, including the geosciences, and onto graduate study, as well as an award-winning home for mentoring for women in STEM.
• Rutgers-Newark runs one of the nation’s longest-running and most successful Minority Biomedical Research Support Programs funded by the National Institutes for Health
• Our Office of Global Initiatives and Experiential Learning makes international travel affordable for our students through short-term stays involving community engaged learning.
• The Minority Student Program of Rutgers Law School-Newark has been diversifying the legal profession in New Jersey and beyond for more than 50 years.
   

At Rutgers-Newark, we are firm believers that access to higher education without the support required to be successful is not really access at all. This belief underlies our array of initiatives that aim to support Latinx student success financially, academically, and in personal and professional growth, including the following.

• The Rutgers University – Newark Talent & Opportunity Pathway program (RU-N to the TOP) uses a sliding scale based on family income to reduce the cost of attendance to as little as $0 for tuition and mandatory fees. Thousands of students already have received that level of support.
• Expansive pathways to careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) can be found at Rutgers-Newark in our Garden State Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation Program (GSLSAMP), Ronald E. McNair Postbaccalaureate Achievement Program, Bridge to Doctorate Fellowship Program, which provide extensive supports from undergraduate through graduate study.
• Latinx students—and students of all backgrounds and identities—find support for their personal, professional, and social development at the Intercultural Resource Center, which serves as a hub for cultural groups including Latinos United Networking America.
• As a very active member of the Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities (HACU), Rutgers-Newark supports students to participate in HACU’s ¡Adelante! Leadership Institute, a student track at the annual conference that cultivates student leaders through a three-day workshop.
• Rutgers-Newark student teams have been finalists in recent years of the HSI Battle of the Brains, an annual cross-disciplinary competition where students from Hispanic-Serving Institutions develop business solutions that incorporate design, policy, business, and STEM components.
• Rutgers-Newark is one of a small number of institutions nationally selected to partner with Braven, a nonprofit organization that provides first-generation college students, students from low-income backgrounds, and students of color with coaching, mentoring, and internship opportunities to secure strong first jobs after graduation. Rutgers-Newark has had more than 1,200 Braven Fellows, with 38% of the class of 2022 being Latinx.