Who Counts in Higher Education?

When Kristine Jan Cruz Espinoza began exploring the number of Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander students enrolled at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV), something didn’t add up.

The university was reporting approximately 200 Pasifika students year to year. But given the rapidly growing Pacific Islander community in Clark County, Espinoza suspected that the number reflected the federal race and ethnicity reporting guidelines the university was required to follow.

With the support of faculty and administrator colleagues, Espinoza conducted a more detailed investigation of the multiple race and ethnicity categories with which students identified. The results spoke for themselves: she immediately saw the number of self-identified Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander students jump from 200 to over 1,450 year to year.

Now an assistant professor at the UC Davis School of Education, Espinoza studies how colleges and universities classify their campus communities, and how student demographic data shape access to funding, resources, and other supports. Her research on race and ethnicity in higher education encompasses Minority-Serving Institutions (MSIs), including Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander-Serving Institutions (AANAPISIs) and Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs), as well as the categories colleges use to classify who enrolls.

“People don’t believe me when I tell them my degree is in higher education,” Espinoza said. “But that’s exactly what I focus on: I research colleges and universities themselves, including how they define their student populations.”

Espinoza’s path to this work has taken her through science and anthropology classrooms, a state senator’s office, and student affairs in the UCLA Department of Asian American Studies. Together, her experiences give Espinoza a view of higher education from multiple angles, revealing that the categories institutions employ are never just descriptive.

“We operate in a world where we classify things,” she said. “But what happens if we create, remove, or complicate those categories and counts associated with said categories?”

How Espinoza Found Her Path to Higher Education

Espinoza’s interest in classification began in science. A California community college transfer student, she attended Long Beach City College and the University of Southern California before transferring to the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa (UH Mānoa). There, she earned bachelor’s degrees in biology and anthropology with plans to become a physician. “Classification schemes are very much a part of my STEM background,” she said, “and I thought my interest in them would lend itself nicely to becoming a medical physician, such as classifying health symptoms.”

While she was studying at UH Mānoa, Espinoza took a job as a peer academic advisor in the College of Education, helping students navigate degree options and course requirements. She also started working with New Student Orientation. These entry points into student affairs were pivotal, leading her to switch from medicine to a master’s in education at UH Mānoa.

During her master’s program, she joined the office of then-Hawai‘i State Senator David Ige as a legislative aide, supporting the Senate Ways and Means Committee. In this role, she saw how decisions made in the legislature impact institutional funding, student opportunities and experiences. This experience also highlighted how universities influence those legislative decisions. “One of Ige’s frequent visitors was the University of Hawai‘i System president,” Espinoza said. “And I realized that that’s how you advocate for students—you go to the policymakers.”

From Working Inside Universities to Studying Them

After completing her master’s degree, Espinoza continued to seek out positions that would give her an inside view of university workings. As a student affairs officer in the UCLA Department of Asian American Studies, she supported undergraduate and graduate students, coordinated programs, scheduled courses, and even organized commencement. “I learned about the important legacy of Ethnic Studies and its continued significance in cultivating critical consciousness,” she said. “But I also got an insider’s perspective on staff and faculty politics and, oftentimes, inequitable budgets across academic departments.”

Her work also placed her at the center of an effort to establish UCLA’s Pilipino Studies minor, the first program of its kind in the University of California system. Creating the minor required Espinoza and her faculty colleagues to navigate administrative processes and collaborate with students, departments, and alumni.

This experience brought together questions familiar to Espinoza: Whose knowledge does a university formally recognize? Which communities receive institutional support? And what must happen behind the scenes for that recognition to become possible? “Helping establish the Pilipino Studies minor was one level of impact,” Espinoza said. “And I wanted to expand the kind of impact I wanted to make in education. For me, pursuing a Ph.D. could help equip me with research skills to do that on a broader scale.”

Espinoza returned to graduate school as a doctoral student in the higher education program at UNLV, where she studied the institutional systems she had experienced from the inside as a student, peer advisor and orientation leader, legislative aide, and staff member.

What Race and Ethnicity Data Can Miss

At UNLV, her research on race and ethnicity in higher education revealed increased counts for Pacific Islander students and other racially minoritized student populations. Undercounting because of federal guidelines was not only an issue for Pacific Islander students, but also American Indian and Alaska Native students, Asian American students, and Black and African American students.

These different counts had the potential to change how the university understood the student populations it served, including how it reported enrollment data at the federal and local campus levels. In fact, one result of this collaborative inquiry led UNLV to update its public-facing student statistics to show enrollment counts by federal guidelines and “duplicate data” from students who self-selected their federal race and ethnicity category.

Espinoza’s findings also underscored something less easily measured: what it means for students to see themselves recognized by their institution. “What does it mean to not count?” Espinoza asked. “To be an asterisk on paper? There are assumptions attached to that—people just start speaking for you.”

What It Means to Be a Minority-Serving Institution

Espinoza now investigates the assumptions embedded in the ways higher education classifies both people and institutions. She identifies gaps in student demographic data and reporting that can prevent colleges and universities from developing a complete understanding of their communities and from directing funding, staff, and other resources where they are needed.

“At a pragmatic or basic level, this work is about resource allocation,” she said. “But it also challenges how we think about classifications themselves. They’re never neutral or ‘just given.’ There’s always a reason behind the ways we categorize people.”

This extends to the labels applied to colleges and universities themselves, including federal designations for Minority-Serving Institutions. These designations can make institutions eligible for funding and signal which populations they enroll. Espinoza is also interested to learn what happens after an institution meets the basic eligibility requirements. She seeks to understand how universities enact service for their students and whether they feel truly supported by the effort.

Espinoza brings this perspective to several initiatives examining how colleges and universities recognize and serve their communities, including the UCLA MSI Data Project, the UC Davis AANAPISI Executive Council, and HSI Research Colectiva. In previous years, she also interned with the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association, American Council on Education Carnegie Classifications, and the American Evaluation Association. These experiences allow her to connect research with the institutional and policy decisions that shape higher education. “My contribution to this work is to help contextualize these categories and document their implications,” she said.

Bringing Her Research to UC Davis

Espinoza’s research focus, particularly her work on Minority-Serving Institutions, is rooted in her lived experiences as a student who entered and navigated U.S. higher education through public broad-access MSIs. “I’m the daughter of immigrants from the Philippines,” Espinoza said. “I entered the U.S. education system through Head Start as a child, was the first in my family to go to college in the United States, and am a proud product of public higher education in three states. My experiences showed me how higher education can expand opportunities for not just individual students but also their communities, and it has shaped my belief in education as a public good.” She is excited to join the faculty at UC Davis, a multi-designated MSI that’s a federally eligible AANAPISI and HSI, as well as a California-state Black-Serving Institution (BSI).

Espinoza’s experiences also inform her perspective on identity, visibility, and representation—topics that have remained central to her career. In keeping with this, she chose to wear a modern interpretation of the Filipiniana, a traditional Filipino blouse, in her faculty photo. She hopes this expression of visibility will speak to Pinay (Filipina American) students who might not see themselves represented among university faculty. “It’s really important that we’re here for students to see,” Espinoza said.

At UC Davis, Espinoza hopes to build on these commitments by connecting her research with California higher education policy. “Joining the UC Davis faculty means I can further develop my research curiosities and community partnerships, particularly as they relate to state-level policies,” she said. “The state capital is just a causeway away. UC Davis is a place where I can deepen my research and build greater real-world impact. I’m excited to be part of this intellectual and academic community committed to doing good work.”