Ph.D. Candidate Jaime Ramirez-Mendoza Examines Equity Gaps in Financial Aid

For many students of color, accessing higher education isn’t a straightforward process. They face challenges such as complex degree requirements, confusing student loan logistics, and discouraging teacher feedback that impact their academic progress. In California alone, only 56% of adults between the ages of 25 and 64 hold a postsecondary degree, and this is even more pronounced along racial lines.

Ph.D. candidate and 2025 National Academy of Education/Spencer Dissertation Fellow Jaime Ramirez-Mendoza is uncovering how the education field can remove barriers to college for students who have been historically underrepresented at the university level. By studying the ways that the financial aid system upholds racial disparities and identifying the unique assets that minority communities bring to higher education, he believes that colleges can create greater access and inclusion for all students.

“It’s critical we continue strengthening discourse around financial aid and asking ‘How are the policies, procedures, and practices racialized?’” said Ramirez-Mendoza. “More importantly, we need to keep sharing stories that highlight the cultural capital students use to persevere in the face of these barriers.”

Students of Color Carry the Weight of an Unwieldy System

Ramirez-Mendoza is part of a large qualitative project that conducted 76 interviews with California high school seniors to gain insight into their college-going experience, including how they were informed about financial aid and supported throughout the application process. He quickly uncovered that challenges such as language barriers, complex jargon used on applications, and sharing parents’ financial information or immigration statuses impacted the students’ decisions to apply for financial aid—or pursue higher education at all.

These types of barriers permeate every level of the financial aid system and follow a student of color throughout the process, from submitting an application to completing final payments. But Ramirez-Mendoza emphasizes that no one should be villainized for this reality: higher education has outgrown its own infrastructure. “It’s not just financial aid,” he said. “It’s enrollment management and admissions, too. What’s the caseload for a financial aid administrator—1,000 students to one person? Every branch of higher education needs to evolve. There’s an ecosystem of problems that require new solutions.”

For one of his dissertation papers, Ramirez-Mendoza selected 34 first-generation Latinx students to interview about how they used cultural capital—knowledge, skills, and other intangible assets—to navigate the aid process. These can include familial connections, community wealth sharing, and extracurricular college opportunity programs. While his study is still ongoing, Ramirez-Mendoza plans to use these 34 interviews to identify methods that students and their support networks used to successfully complete their applications and access financial aid. He will then compile the students’ experiences into recommendations that can help transform financial aid policy and institutional practices.

Building Community, Advocating for Change

Ramirez-Mendoza’s research is informed by his own experience as first-generation, low-income Latino who served as an advisor for College of the Redwoods and UC Davis Upward Bound, the UC Davis Educational Opportunity Program, and the UC Berkeley Destination College Advising Corp. In these positions, he learned just how valuable access to resources and mentors can be for a student of color who’s aspiring to attend college.

“You have to find tactics that reverse decisions the system has made on your behalf: to leverage the system to make decisions that actually work for you,” Ramirez-Mendoza said. “As an advisor, I realized it was never a lack of trying on my students’ parts that kept them from college. It was never a lack of brilliance either. It was a chasm in access to critical information they needed to know but had never been afforded.”

The challenges that financial aid poses are also indicative of other barriers students of color can experience leading up to and entering college. For Ramirez-Mendoza, this manifested as isolation and exclusion as one of few Latinx students in his undergraduate classes. “I did everything right,” he said. “I was a textbook success: straight A’s, full ride to college. And yet, I still didn’t feel like I belonged.” It wasn’t until Ramirez-Mendoza enrolled in a Chicano Studies elective, a decision that ultimately led him to double major in the subject, that he realized there were students, faculty, and curricula that he could identify with—and continue advocating for.

Now, Ramirez-Mendoza aims to change this reality for other students of color, starting with the financial aid process. By celebrating their resilience—and simultaneously shining a light on entrenched systemic barriers—he can create more affordable pathways to college and transform the financial aid ecosystem to better serve all students.

“When kids are on the last step of that ladder to college,” said Ramirez-Mendoza, “I always say, ‘This is going to be hard. But if you create community and honor where you came from, you’ll always find your way.’”