Diversity Scam: Selling the Farm and Livestock to Pay the Mortgage and Bills


Having turned itself into a Hispanic-Serving Institution, Whittier College must maintain a minimum 25% Hispanic enrollment, and fully one-half of these Hispanic students must be from families living below the official federal poverty level, and must be in the process of becoming a "largely-Hispanic" school, that is having a Latino enrollment of up to 60% of total enrollment, to receive millions in largely unrestricted Title V funding

This website has learned of working poor Hispanic students recruited by Whittier College, who drop out after an academic year or two, saddled with student loans that thwart attempts to complete their higher education. But Whittier College, whether such students succeed or not, so long as new students can be recruited to take the place of the most recent diversity scam victims, will receive student loan and Title V monies.

From MySpace:

"The first thing i noticed when i started [at Whittier College]...is that there is not too many hispanics even though [the College] insists there is. The majority of the school is White. There is hispanics but i honestly haven't seen too many."

To whittiergate:

"Most...Hispanic kids at Whittier...are pretty white-washed and are nowhere near the poverty level."

From whittiergate Conversation with Bart Brown:


whittiergate 2: "Rogelio Chavez entered Whittier College, and Roger Lodge left Whittier"

More to whittiergate:

"...a mexican girl on my (Whittier College dorm) floor was thrilled when she saw the word 'spic' written on her door."

"as most Hispanic kids saw how Whittier sucked, they transferred out"

"Study abroad? Only 10% of Whittier students studying abroad are Hispanic."

If anyone at Whittier College has the nerve to suggest that a Mexican-American kid from any Southwest U. S. barrio going to school for a year at Whittier 'partner' UABC (Universidad Autonoma de Baja Californa) is in any way equivalent to a school year in, say, Barcelona, then that suggestion can only be a calculated effort to hide the fact that there is discrimination against mostly working poor Hispanics in Whittier College's Study Abroad programs, as in other Whittier programs, and be sentenced to spend a year in northern Baja California. And even though it might seem completely outrageous, authorities had better check to make sure that foreign nationals from UABC at Whittier College are not counted as Mexican-American students as part of the College's fraudulently obtaining federal funds through the Hispanic-Serving Institutions program.

"poor kids feel alienated, have a hard time adjusting and end up transferring out"

Whittier College graduates, according to U. S. News, carry with them, along with their diploma, the 3rd highest debt burden of all liberal arts colleges in the United States. The logical pursuit of higher education by Hispanic and all working poor students, is to adjust to the demands of college and satisfy required courses at a community college, work and save money, then transfer to either subsidized state or public ivy universities to complete their higher education.

By practically reinventing itself as a Hispanic-Serving Institution, Whittier College has placed itself in the company of not first or even second tier private liberal arts colleges, much less of public ivy, but rather of state universities and even community colleges.

Looking at a self-reported application acceptance rate of practically 80%, and a retention rate Whittier College refers to as an area in which it’s improving, diversity recruitment appears to be a short-term business decision in neither students’ nor the College’s long-term best interests. Obviously, the self-created need to now maintain a fixed percentage of Hispanic and poor Hispanic students at Whittier College, puts pressures on the College to be less than objective about either such students’ best interests or academic and other standards.

Not surprisingly, Whittier College President Sharon Herzberger talks, when SAT test scores at the College are relatively low, about measures other than standardized testing to gauge a student’s probability of success in college, and diversity is not only promoted by but is woven into the very philosophy, and financial planning, of Whittier College.

To whittiergate:

"[My] class had the lowest high school gpa's... making the campus more diverse."

From studentsreview.com:

"Although [Whittier College] prides itself on diversity, there is a feeling that it is crammed down the throats of its students."


"Academic achievement is not a big factor in getting accepted (into Whittier College)."

"...everyone knows that Whittier isn't as hard to get into as a lot of other schools."

This website has learned of white middle class student families, living in predominantly Hispanic communities, being told by Whittier College spokespersons that their child would be classified as a diversity student by the College. Evidently, racial quotas pose threats to not only standards, but also to ethics.

The original issue giving rise to what the federal government has now responded to with a half-billion dollars and counting spending spree on Hispanic-Serving Institutions, is so far removed from Whittier College's exploitation of Hispanic students that the College's ethics have been brought into question from the moment the decision was made to reinvent Whittier as a H-S I.

In a case before the Texas Supreme Court, MALDEF represented the petitioners in LULAC, Et Al v. Richards, Et Al (1987). MALDEF failed to convince the Court that the State had discriminated against border area colleges. This initial defeat, however, was only one, and a seminal, battle.

Vice-President for Policy and Research for Excellence in Education, Deborah A. Santiago, explains that "...the invention of Hispanic-Serving Institutions as an institutional classification is fairly recent. In the mid-80's, educational leaders and policymakers saw value in identifying institutions that enrolled large concentrations of Latino students." The purposes of H-S I's Santiago emphasizes are to target funding to improve the quality of education at those schools with "large concentrations" of Hispanic students, and to make H-S I's more affordable than other similar institutions. Clearly, at Whittier College, the purposes of
H-S I's have less to do with Hispanic student and society's interests than with the College's bottom line. Whittier College doesn't even recommend student loans with the lowest interest rates to its student families.

From MySpace:

"...i have never heard of H-S I. as far as i know i didn't get accepted into Whittier because of that. i decided to come to Whittier because since it is a private school they help a lot more with financial aid"

To whittiergate:

"[Whittier College] would give [ethnic students] an endowment... The students would think it was a good thing, more free money, but...they only make things worse" "Say you got $15,000 from Whittier, and happened to get another 15k from somewhere else...Whittier will retract their scholarship"

"parents call [Whittier College Financial Aid] crying"

"...parents like mine" are "clueless of which loan to take out," they don't "know anything about...interest rates..."


Question: "So you're telling me that you left Whittier College after one academic year, and you owe Whittier College $10,000.00, plus interest, and you owe lenders $20,000.00, plus interest?"
Answer: "Yes" (H-S I student from Latino family living below poverty level)

"I was thinking of being a RA, so that my dorm fee of $10k would be reduced...but...Whittier would just deduct...10k from my other awards and I would still have to shell out the 10k somehow"

"She (a teaching credential program transfer student) was Hispanic...and...low income. ...Whittier didn't offer her any free money"


The separate and unequal Texas border schools' enrollments, giving rise to today's federal H-S I program, were above 60% Latino. The first federal H-S I eligibility rules required a minimum 40% Hispanic enrollment, with numerous additional provisions related to family income, being a first generation college student, and so on. As Latino political influence has waxed, the H-S I requirements have been "streamlined" so that now a just 25% Hispanic enrollment is deemed to constitute a "critical mass", indicating a school is in the process of becoming an institution with a large concentration of Hispanic students, and the earlier additional provisions have been largely deleted. It's at this point that it became feasible for Whittier College to reinvent itself as a H-S I, if Whittier's decision-makers put economic pressure before ethics.

whittiergate has confirmed that the percentage of Hispanics enrolled at Whittier College now and recently is significantly lower than it has been in the past. This fact flies in the face of the H-S I program's intentions: a 25% Hispanic enrollment is used to define the 'threshold' of a school in the process of becoming largely-Hispanic, does not define a largely-Hispanic school. When Whittier College's Hispanic enrollment as a percentage is significantly lower in 2007 than in 1997, then how can 25% now be accepted in Whittier's case as the required H-S I threshold?

According to Jane M. Rifkin, published in the May-October 1997 issue of Hispanic Times, Whittier College's Hispanic enrollment was 5.5% in 1970 (no Hispanic-Serving Institution money to be scammed), and 34% in 1997 (when Hispanic-Serving Institution money was available, and when Whittier College was trying hard to shake off the negative Watergate scandal-Nixon resignation era impact on enrollment, needed students, income). Evidently, once Whittier College realized it could get away with just the 25% threshold as a continuing H-S I-qualifying percentage, Whittier's Hispanic enrollment declined to as close to that percentage as possible on a continuing basis. The U. S. Department of Education puts Whittier College's self-reported 2005 Hispanic percentage of undergraduates at 26.67%.

The author of the Whittier College Hispanic-Serving Institutions program scam was Dr. James Lee Ash, Jr., the infamous outed gay ex-president of Whittier College, with a predilection for boys who can't legally drink in California, recently paroled from a Nevada state prison for drug trafficking convictions. Ash was hailed in the local press at the time he came up with this scam as "a genius of finance and student recruitment" and as the saviour of Whittier College.

Jim Ash is now being sued by the Greater Nevada Credit Union for failure to repay a $32,000 loan, and still owes a Nevada residential treatment program $35,000. There are differences between a con man and a genius of finance, among them con men going to prison. As for Ash's student recruiting record, the restraining and stay away orders issued in Nevada courts barring him from contact with a named 18 year old boy and from all males under 21 years of age reveal motivation.

Later Whittier College presidents, including acting President Jan Legoza and now Sharon Herzberger, have made clear that the College wants as few Latino students as possible and still get H-S I funding, lowering and then carefully maintaining Whittier's Latino enrollment right at the minimum threshold for H-S I funds, but they've failed to take into account the fact that H-S I policy requires recipient schools not only have enrolled a minimum percentage of Hispanic students, but also that recipient schools must be in the process of becoming "largely Hispanic", which Whittier College most certainly is not. Still, as Whittier College president, Dr. Ash needed a Latino front man to get the then new H-S I scam, that would not only bring students to Whittier when they were needed, but also federal funds that would mean those students yielded twice as much money for the school as non-H-S I students, started...

The unwitting Tio Tomas in this history is Martin Ortiz, Director of the former Whittier College Center for Mexican-American Affairs. Mr. Ortiz suffered through a Whittier College program in 1948, when "no barber would touch his head, no restaurant would give him a table, no landlord would rent an apartment to Ortiz." On the Whittier College campus then, "...his skin color, his last name...kept him from being accepted by other students." Jane Rifkin wrote in 1997 that Ortiz had "recently lured 700 Latino students and their parents to Whittier College for an afternoon meeting and reception." The deluded believer leading lambs to slaughter. To judge by Whittier College's H-S I minimum requirement-skimming Hispanic enrollment percentage these days, or threshold fraud, Martin Ortiz was evidently held to be overzealous.

Why is Whittier College being granted H-S I Title V funding intended for schools becoming largely Hispanic, when Whittier College is not becoming largely Hispanic?


Whittier College is maintaining just the minimum 25% Hispanic enrollment necessary to receive federal H-S I Title V funds. The average Hispanic enrollment at H-S I schools is over 50%. Meanwhile, HBCU's (Historically Black Colleges and Universities) and TCU's (Tribal Colleges and Universities) are not increasing in number, as H-S I's are, and face obstacles removed for H-S I's, nor are TCU's or HBCU's operated under Title V, further diminishing their relative impacts. The Los Angeles basin has large African- and Native American among many other ethnic student pools, but it's Hispanics for whom the federal government is opening the Title V spigot for now.

Robert Rodriguez wrote not long ago for the Los Angeles Times about multiculturalism in the U. K. Rodriguez quotes Trevor Philips, the son of Afro-Caribbean parents in the U. K. and Chairman of the Home Office-funded Commission For Racial Equality, “We have turned something very positive 20 to 25 years ago into something negative…that holds back the process of integration rather than encourages it.”

Multicultural models encourage separate cultures by “making it appear advantageous to stay different”, in reality pit ethnic groups against one another while making the white majority resentful.

When is Whittier College, the home of an annual Martin Luther King oratorical contest, going to get that it really isn’t the color of your skin but the content of your character that’s important?

Where do 'role models', like Tony Villaraigosa, go to school?

See the answer at Whittier College Diversity Scam Applied to Law School Backfires

Diversity? Bad science.

See why Stanford and Cal Tech among other better schools challenge the 'Statement on Diversity' issued by the WASC (Western Association of Schools and Colleges, the organization that accredits western U. S. schools, Whittier College among them)...

From the National Association of Scholars:
Is Campus Racial Diversity Correlated with Educational Benefits? http://www.nas.org/polReports.cfm

  Scroll down to and click on 2001
Race and Higher Education
Open PDF file 'Why Justice Powell's
Diversity Rationale for Racial Preference
in Higher Education Must Be Rejected'
by Thomas E. Wood, Executive Director,
California Association of Scholars, and
Malcolm J. Sherman, Associate Professor
of Mathematics and Statistics,
State University of New York at Albany

Affirmative Action and the Degradation of Academic Integrity
http://m3peeps.org/aadai.htm

NEW: Whites have become a minority for the first time in Whittier College's history

Trying to avoid being busted for defrauding the federal Hispanic-Serving Institutions program, Whittier College's Class of 2013 was recruited with an emphasis on Latinos, but the school ended up with higher percentages of other ethnic minorities as well. Every ethnicity but Whites increased their enrollment percentage over the previous year, while Whites declined to become a minority for the first time in Whittier College's history. And still Whittier College has failed to enroll even as many Latinos as were recruited the first year of its H-S I scam, clearly is not in the process of becoming a largely Hispanic school. White enrollment, still over 40%, would have to gradually fall to nearly 20%, while the College recruited nearly twice as many Latinos as it has done so far, to become a largely Hispanic school. Whittier College will be out of business before that happens.

Whittier College is now a collection of minorities, like Balkanized Los Angeles where education quality continues its unabated fall. The last school the most promising Latino students want to go to is a Hispanic-majority school, he or she wants to go to a White-majority school. A whittiergate survey this past summer of high achieving public secondary school Latina seniors confirmed our common sense in this respect very clearly and strongly, in fact unanimously. Nor do Whites want to go to other than a White-majority school. Even Asian students, stereotypically higher achieving than White students, want to go to White-majority schools.

The course Sharon Herzberger's steering Whittier College on is ever more clearly toward a shipwreck. White students are progressively less interested in Whittier College, and Whittier College recruiters are already scraping the bottom of the academic barrel, focusing now on Upward Bound and AVID programs participants, students in high school programs trying to stretch average public school students into college material, so desperate the school is to dodge its Hispanic-Serving Institutions scam consequences. Soon Asian students will figure this out and, like Whites, prove increasingly resistant to Whittier College recruiter lures, and other ambitious minority students will follow suit.

And Latino students from Upward Bound and AVID programs aren't going to fit in at Whittier like kids with privileged upbringings, including Latinos like the Cisneros and Villalobos kids, have fit in. The poor public school Latinos are going to do what working poor Latinos do, and Whittier College is going to find itself, like a male puma with the back of a female's neck in his jaws after raping her, wondering how in hell he's going to get out of this position he's put himself in.

If one is a White racist, sexist, lying and cheating bully, the type Whittier College has believed its continuing existence depends upon, you had better look out - because you are no longer a majority at Whittier College. One of these days, what do you think is going to happen when you're a rude little b*tch? It won't matter who your daddy is then. Like the song lyric put it, it's comin' and it won't be long. And then the trickle of White students - and ambitious students of every ethnicity - will dry up completely.

No matter what Whittier College does now it's difficult to see how the College can avoid being busted for defrauding the federal Hispanic-Serving Institutions program for over a decade, which scam has not only wrongly taken money from the federal government, from taxpayers, but has harmed many more Latinos than it has helped. Whittier College can only lose any residual credibility it may still have with any and every ethnic group. After all, everyone wants a quality education, and it's clear that Whittier College no longer offers respected degrees and that things are continuing to worsen year by year. Yet Sharon Herzberger continues her faux diversity song like the Pied Piper of Hamelin. Children, wake up! Parents, don't let your children go - to Whittier College!

Whittier College Opens Door For Students in U.S. llegally

V-P for Enrollment Lisa Meyer admits Whittier College doesn't check the legal status of student applicants.

Since social security numbers are necessary for financial aid and other college-related processes, Whittier College knows which applicants are in the U.S. legally and even more certainly illegally, but this school's interested only in the money, not the law, and by accepting illegal Hispanic/Latino students, Whittier College not only gets that student's money, but even more money - from the federal Hispanic-Serving Institutions program based on that student being enrolled as a Latino/Latiina - and at the same time appears to be increasing Latino enrollment, which is necessary to avoid being busted for defrauding the H-S I program and having to return millions of taxpayer dollars.

It's going to be embarrassing, for starters, when ICE agents start showing up on campus and taking Whittier students away. And padding Hispanic enrollment stats with students in the U.S. illegally can only further weaken any defense against the charge of defrauding the H-S I program. This is only digging a deeper hole, but then that's a Whittier College specialty.

UPDATE: Fun with Numbers

Either the Whittier College administration has provided doctored numbers to the American Enterprise Institute or can't do basic math. Gee, we wonder which is the case...or could it be both?!

The American Enterprise Institute says the Whittier College Hispanic graduation rate is 63%! Lies, damned lies, and statistics!!

Yet again this college's math & sciences and social sciences profs decline to set the record straight. Real stand up guys and gals, eh? And we guess student groups like MEChA and the Hispanic Students Association are so busy bleaching themselves that they have no time for the truth either.

Every misrepresentation the Whittier College administration is allowed to get away with is another open wound to what's left of the spirit and character of this liberal arts college community... The sad truth is that we just can't believe anything this administration says.

Opinion: Does Affirmative Action Help College Students?

A U. S. Commission on Civil Rights report "concludes that accepting an affirmative action leg up probably hurts a student's chances of becoming a doctor, scientist, or engineer. A better strategy is to attend a school at which one's entering academic credentials roughly match the median student's."

"A good student can get in over his head and end up learning little or nothing if he is placed in a classroom with students whose level of academic preparation is much higher than his own even though he is fully capable of mastering the material when presented at a more moderate pace."

According to Psychology Professors Frederick Smyth and John McArdle (USC), "45% more minority women and 35% more minority men...would have persisted in science and engineering if they had attended schools where their academic credentials matched their peers."

The National Science Foundation has "reported that with only 20% of total African-American [college] enrollment, HBCUs (Historically-Black Colleges and Universities) produce 40% of the African-Americans graduating with a bachelor's degree in physical sciences."

These are facts "high school seniors deserve to know. The Commission challenges colleges and universities to tell them."

http://www.aol.news.com/2010/12/24/opinion-does-affirmative-action-help-college-students/ by Gail Heriot, Professor of Law, University of San Diego and member of the U. S. Commission on Civil Rights

Prospective Hispanic/Latino students need, in Whittier College's case, to factor in not only Whittier's lack of hard sciences courses, this school's lack of academic integrity and declining degree values (getting a better grade by cheating, routine at Whittier, doesn't prepare a student to do anything but try and fail to get away with cheating in the post-school 'real world'), and increasing costs in the context of a declining economy (see whittiergate's 'Whittier College Return on Investment Among Very Worst' page), but also the fact that Whittier College recruits inadequately prepared Latino students as part of this school's increasingly desperate efforts to avoid being busted for defrauding the Hispanic-Serving Institutions program. Bottom line: Do you want to be the mark in a con job, do you want to be part of the exploitation of your own ethnic group?

African-American students aren't recruited, with only a few exceptions, like athletes from community colleges - because the number of HBCUs had been capped, while the number of H-S I program schools continues to increase. When Whittier College was really desperate for students in the wake of the Watergate scandal, then Whittier President James Lee Ash, Jr. who went on to be an inmate in the State of Nevada penal system, came up with the H-S I scam. It's worth repeating that while Whittier College has bet on the exploitation of Latino students by hook or by crook or both to survive, if this school had been able to get into the HBCU program and scam funds from that source, instead of the yet to be capped H-S I program, then Whittier would be recruiting Black students, prepared or not, instead of Latino students, prepared or not. Whittier College doesn't like Hispanics or Latinos and dislike African-Americans, this College doesn't really care about any of us; Whittier College just wants money, that's all. The bottom line has become everything at Whittier College.

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