Estela Mara Bensimon
USC Rossier School of Education
Equity is more than a buzzword for Estela Mara Bensimon. A professor at the USC Rossier School of Education and founding director of the school’s Center for Urban Education (CUE), Bensimon has dedicated much of her career to understanding and addressing racial and ethnic inequalities in higher education.
Bensimon was the driving force behind CUE, which she launched in 1999 based on her observation that the victories in terms of access to higher education that had been achieved in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement – although historic and significant – still needed to be translated into equitable educational outcomes for African-American and Latino students.
Bensimon called upon educators and policymakers to “move beyond talking about diversity in terms of who goes to college so we can have the harder, more substantive and urgent conversation about who finishes.”
During its first 10 years, CUE has fostered research that has helped institutions of higher education across the country become more accountable to students from underserved racial and ethnic communities. Building on its inaugural model (the “Diversity Scorecard”), the center has pioneered a multi-disciplined approach, called the CUE Equity Model, which provides accountability, inquiry and benchmarking tools for assessing progress toward closing the racial achievement gap in college completion.
More recently, Bensimon has been deeply involved in the creation of the ASHE (Association for the Study of Higher Education) Institutes on Equity and Critical Policy Analysis. Funded by the Ford Foundation and launched in summer 2009, the institutes are a collaboration among seven institutions across the United States. The goal is to cultivate research examining racial and ethnic inequality in higher education as well as to create a network of equity-minded scholars – including graduate students and faculty as well as policy analysts – who can address these issues as a community.