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here’s a gap out there. A big one. And Oscar F. Rojas Perez, a 2011 UC Irvine alumnus and first-generation college student, was at risk of falling into it. It’s called the Latinx college degree gap. Simply put, Latinx Americans are half as likely to hold a college degree as non-Hispanic white adults. By the numbers According to a study by The Education Trust, 22.6 percent of Latinx Americans ages 25 to 64 held a two-year college degree or higher in 2016. More than 30 percent of black American adults had a college degree, and 47.1 percent of white adults did. That’s nearly a 25-percentage point gap in college attainment between Latinxs and whites. Furthering the gap, only 17 percent of Latinx adults who were born abroad have a college education.
Oscar Rojas Perez.
bridging the GAP UCI first-generation alumnus Oscar F. Rojas Perez is proof of the power of mentorship, and now he’s paying it forward
Hidden in the data Within that 17 percent of Latinx adults who were born abroad and have a college education you’ll find Rojas Perez. Currently a postdoctoral fellow at Boston University Medical Campus, Massachusetts General Hospital, he graduated in 2019 from the University of Missouri with a Ph.D. in counseling psychology and completed his undergraduate work with honors at UCI with a double major in Chicano/Latino studies and sociology. He was named the 2020 Lauds & Laurels Distinguished Young Alumnus award recipient. But if you rewind just a few short years, Rojas Perez didn’t even know if college was an attainable path. Born in Guatemala, he moved to the United States at the age of 5. He was raised in a single-parent household and attended school in Anaheim, but was always discouraged at school because his reading and writing skills lagged years behind his peers.
