ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY

244 Journal of College Counseling ■ October 2015 ■ Volume 18

© 2015 by the American Counseling Association. All rights reserved.

Received 05/06/12 Revised 10/12/12

Accepted 12/03/12 DOI: 10.1002/jocc.12018

African American and Latino Men’s Recommendations for an

Improved Campus Environment Alison Cerezo, James Lyda, Alma Enriquez, Matthew Beristianos,

and Michael Connor

The purpose of this study was to share findings from semistructured qualitative interviews with 9 African American and 12 Latino men about their ideas on how university personnel could better support their needs. Stressing the need for African American men to learn self-reliance to counter microaggressions, African American participants offered recommendations to students rather than personnel. Latino participants discussed the need for personnel to provide critical information about college resources.

Keywords: African Americans, Latinos, microaggressions

Despite increased representation in the United States, African American and Latino young men struggle in many important areas of their lives. For the past 4 decades, they have maintained the highest school dropout and incarceration rates of all ethnic groups in the United States (Reyes & Nakagawa, 2010), and although most youth transition from adolescence to adulthood to lead healthy, sustainable lives, “some young people, a dispropor- tionate number of whom are Black and Latino males, are trapped in a cycle of prison, poverty, and disadvantage” (Reyes & Nakagawa, 2010, p. 37). With respect to college completion, the number of African American and Latino men attaining a bachelor’s degree is much lower than the number of White and Asian and Pacific Islander men (Aud et al., 2012). It is known that degree attainment contributes to greater economic stability (U.S. Department of Labor, 2015), which is positively associated with mental health (Eaton & Muntaner, 1999). Thus, diminished educational attainment has significant consequences for African American and Latino men, who already contend with gendered racism in the workplace, housing, and many other important areas of their lives (Edley & Ruiz de Velasco, 2010).

The academic achievement of African American and Latino men is an impor- tant issue for counselors in educational settings. As outlined by Lewis, Arnold, House, and Toporek (2003), advocacy-oriented counselors “recognize the impact of social, political, economic, and cultural factors on human development” (p. 1) and, in the case of African American and Latino men, understand both the challenges they face in their pursuit of higher education and the importance of degree completion for men’s later quality of life. Unfortunately, research has found that as Latino men advance in college, they become less likely to rely Alison Cerezo, Alma Enriquez, Matthew Beristianos, and Michael Connor, California School of Professional Psychology, Alliant International University; James Lyda, Student Health and Counseling Services, University of California, San Francisco. Alison Cerezo is now at Department of Counseling, San Francisco State University. Correspondence con- cerning this article should be addressed to Alison Cerezo, Department of Counseling, San Francisco State University, 1600 Holloway Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94132 (e-mail: acerezo@sfsu.edu).

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on others for support (Gloria, Castellanos, Scull, & Villegas, 2009). Muñoz (1986) found that Latino students reported higher levels of personal stress than did their White peers when they sought out support for academic and/ or personal needs for fear that they were confirming others’ perceptions that they were not college material. Therefore, more research is needed to explore the barriers faced by African American and Latino college men with accessing critical campus resources, such as mental health support, as well as the important role counselors can play in improving men’s overall educational experiences.

Conceptual Framework

This study was greatly informed by critical race theory (CRT), a paradigm based in critical legal studies (Delgado & Stefancic, 2001; Ladson-Billings, 1998) that emerged in the 1970s to critique the treatment of race and racism in American legal ideology and practice. Critical legal studies was rooted in the assumption that legal doctrine within the United States, having developed amid the back- drop of the nation’s historically oppressive treatment of people of color, could not function as a race-neutral system. Rather, the American legal system, much like other major institutions, was an extension of the racist underpinnings of the country and thereby inadvertently served to maintain the status quo (i.e., the mistreatment of people of color). Within education, CRT has been adopted as a conceptual framework that places a historical and cultural lens on educational policies and policy making and thereby encourages an analysis of racial exclu- sion and other forms of discrimination against students (Ladson-Billings, 1998; Villalpando, 2004). CRT is a useful approach for considering how educational contexts contribute to the persistent underperformance of particular groups. For example, Goodman and West-Olatunji (2010) reported that many African American and Latina/o students face traumatic stress in educational settings as a result of racial oppression, which leads to underachievement behaviors. Racial inequity in schools, as evidenced by systemic barriers and microaggres- sions (brief, subtle racial slights and insults that can be either intentional or unintentional toward people of color; Pierce, 1995; Sue, 2010), often engender a lack of trust and connection with key university personnel, thereby derailing many students’ academic motivation and persistence.

A central tenet of CRT is the practice of giving voice (Ladson-Billings, 1998; Solorzano & Yosso, 2002; Torre, 2009), which is the practice of honoring the experiential knowledge of people of color. The purpose of giving voice is to recognize that persons of color hold critical knowledge from their lived experiences of negotiating ethnic and racial minority identities in the United States, and that this knowledge is imperative to success in important domains of life, such as higher education. Too often, researchers who are disconnected from the lived experiences of African American and Latino men generate theories about what would be helpful to their college success. Consistent with CRT and the aim of giving voice, this study instead seeks to centralize men’s insights by directly asking them to share recommendations about what they believe would contribute to their success in college.

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Sharing participants’ recommendations is especially important in shifting campus culture, given the body of literature on racial campus climate. Research has supported that students of color perceive university environments as more hostile and unfriendly than do White students (e.g., Gloria & Rodriguez, 2000; Nuñez, 2009; Yosso, Smith, Ceja, & Solorzano, 2009), which has contributed to a range of barriers to students’ academic endeavors.

The Campus Climate and Its Impact on Sense of Belonging

Perceptions of a hostile racial climate among students of color have been associ- ated with lowered academic motivation and persistence (Gloria & Rodriguez, 2000), racial battle fatigue (Smith, Allen, & Danley, 2007), and a reduced sense of belonging (Hurtado & Ponjuan, 2005; Nuñez, 2009). Sense of belonging is especially important to consider for African American and Latino men given their low numbers in college and the consequent challenges they may encoun- ter with feeling a sense of shared cultural identity with others. The concept of sense of belonging is grounded in Tinto’s (1975) theory of social integration and involves students’ ability to integrate to the social and academic structure of the university. To put it simply, belongingness describes whether a student feels that he or she belongs in his or her given college environment.

Related to the concept of belongingness, Walton and Cohen (2007) introduced belongingness uncertainty to describe when members of socially stigmatized groups are uncertain about the quality of their social bonds in academic or professional environments. Walton and Cohen suggested that, for students from marginalized backgrounds, such uncertainty negatively affects their achievement motivation and performance because students are continuously gauging whether they fit, and thus belong, on campus. Mallet and Swim (2009) found that college students of color reported a minimum of one discriminatory event per week, whereas Mallet et al. (2011) found that students of color reported greater frequency of discriminatory experiences than did White students and that, for students of color, considering personal experiences with discrimination was associated with a reduced sense of belonging.

Monetary Stress and Social Class Identity

African American and Latino men experience stressors in their college pursuits that extend beyond campus climate and diminish their sense of belonging. Ap- proximately 30% of African American and 23% of Latino young adults (ages 16–25 years) live at or near poverty, residing in households with yearly incomes of less than $25,000 (Pew Hispanic Center, 2009). Monetary stress has been found to affect students’ decisions to work, which, in turn, places restrictions on the time available to focus on academics (Boznick, 2007; Van Etten, Pressley, McInerney, & Liem, 2008). Yet the influence of social class position is not just about financial hardship. Ostrove and Cole (2003) proposed that social class

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plays a major role in the dynamics of educational contexts in which students develop social identities and come to understand their future opportunities in the academic and work worlds. Van Etten et al. (2008) found that college seniors from lower income backgrounds negotiate social class in the educational context by balancing competing messages from individuals and institutions about their future opportunities. Institutional representatives were perceived as providing supportive messages that college completion would lead to upward mobility as well as discouraging messages that, as low-income students, participants had already achieved a great deal by reaching college and no one expected them to achieve further. Considering that many African American and Latino college men are emerging from low-income households (Pew Hispanic Center, 2009), social class is another social identity component that must be considered when understanding the myriad cultural issues influencing their college pathways.

Purpose Statement

African American and Latino college men face significant challenges in their pursuit of higher education. These young men often contend with both tangible and per- ceived barriers, such as limited financial resources, the knowledge to gain entrance to a university, and gendered racism and consequent belongingness uncertainty. The goal of this study was to enact CRT in an effort to give voice to the recom- mendations offered by African American and Latino men about their ideas of how college personnel could better support them as men of color. In line with this goal, we developed two open-ended questions to gather men’s recommendations:

1. At most universities, men of color are few in number. How do you think being a Latino/African American man affects your college experiences?

2. Do you have any recommendations for how this university can better support African American/Latino men to be successful in school and graduate?

Method

Participants

Twenty-one (nine African American, 12 Latino) college men attending a midsize public university on the West Coast participated in this study. The ethnic composition of the undergraduate student body was 27.7% Asian American, 23.0% White, 13.7% Hispanic, 12.6% African American, 0.7% Na- tive American, 5.9% international, and 16.4% unknown.

The mean age of participants was 23 years old (24 years old for Afri- can Americans, 22 years old for Latinos), with six students (three African Americans and three Latinos) being nontraditional age. Two of the Latino participants were attending university without legal residence in the United States. Two of the African American and 10 of the Latino participants were first-generation college students. The average grade point average (GPA) for

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the African American and Latino participants was 3.07 (SD = 0.50) and 2.90 (SD = 0.42), respectively. The African American participants had a range of academic majors: Five were science, technology, engineering, and math majors; one was a business major; and three were liberal arts majors. For the Latino participants, 11 were liberal arts majors, and one was an engineering major.

Research Team

The research team was composed of five members. Gender and ethnic identification in order of authorship were as follows: a woman of Puerto Rican and Guatemalan descent, a man of African American and White descent, a woman of Mexican descent, a man of Mexican and White descent, and a man of African American descent. Apart from the second author whose father completed college, each of the members of the research team was the first in his or her family to attend college. Unlike the African American participants who discussed challenges with retention because of a sense of belonging, the two African American men on our research team did not experience difficulty with building community or degree completion. However, there was overlap in experiences between the Latino participants and the Latino members of the research team. Specifically, Latino research team mem- bers also faced financial limitations as college students, which prompted part-time employment during college.

Each member of the research team was involved in the recruitment of participants and data analysis, and the second, fourth, and fifth authors (the men on our team) conducted all interviews. Before data collection was initiated, all members hypoth- esized that participants would discuss the importance of family (based on our own strong familial ties that we identified as being related to our ethnic backgrounds as Latinos and African Americans) and a general recognition of the low number of African American and Latino men in university. We hypothesized that men’s recog- nition of their low representation on campus would affect their sense of belonging, which, in turn, would contribute to reduced psychological well-being. However, we did not have any assumptions about the relation between sense of belonging and academic achievement or degree completion. Aside from these assumptions, we did not have any other specific expectations about the data.

Data Collection

Participants were notified about the research project via e-mails sent to the electronic mailing lists of several departments (programs that gave permission included mathematics, romance languages, sociology, and ethnic studies), flyers posted throughout the university campus, and verbal recruitment via messages provided to ethnic student organizations serving African American and Latino students. Recruitment methods resulted in a convenience sample of 21 participants.

Participants completed an open-ended demographic questionnaire and an in-depth semistructured interview. The demographic questionnaire gathered background information about participants and their families, self-reported college GPA and high school GPA, and involvement in campus organizations. Each interview was conducted in a private area of campus (e.g., library, class-

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rooms) during a single, in-person meeting that lasted approximately 90–120 minutes. Interviews were conducted during the spring and summer sessions of the 2010 academic year, and participants were compensated with a $25 debit card for their participation. The third author transcribed the interviews verbatim. The first author reviewed four random tapes and found no incon- sistencies between tapes and transcriptions.

The research team unanimously agreed that gender match between interviewer and participant was essential for our project. We wanted to provide an accepting and empathetic environment that provided African American and Latino men with an opportunity to truthfully share the triumphs and hardships that they experienced related to the intersection of male gender and race. In line with previous research on the benefits of ethnic match (Cabral & Smith, 2011; Cerezo & Chang, 2013; Chao, Steffen, & Heiby, 2011) in therapeutic and academic outcomes, we worked from the assumption that other men of color, through their own lived experiences, could best create an accepting and empathic environment.

Data Analysis

Data presented in this article are from a larger qualitative study that involved a single, in-person semistructured interview with 21 African American (n = 9) and Latino (n = 12) male participants, which explored factors that con- tributed to college access and retention. For this study, we used a section of the interviews conducted with all 21 participants in which they were asked the following two questions: (a) At most universities, men of color are few in number. How do you think being a Latino/African American man affects your college experiences? and (b) Do you have any recommendations for how this university can better support African American/Latino men to be successful in school and graduate? Responses to these questions were used for this study because our goal was to enact the process of giving voice that is consistent with CRT (Ladson-Billings, 1998; Solorzano & Yosso, 2002; Torre, 2009) by sharing participants’ recommendations for how college per- sonnel could better support their success in college. Thus, for this study, we did not analyze any other sections of the interview during data analysis, and this section of the data is not presented elsewhere.

We used a thematic analysis (Coffey & Atkinson, 1996; Gibbs, 2007) to identify and share participants’ recommendations. Because data analysis was content driven, we did not place preconceived categories on data and instead allowed for themes to emerge from the data as coding proceeded. Specifi- cally, each member of the research team read through the narrative text of each interview and used open coding to match passages of the interview with thematic ideas. This was done individually, and results were brought back to the group for each interview. During group meetings, we would share themes we identified in the interview, along with the passages we attached to the identified themes. We achieved a group consensus through open discus- sions with all the team members present; in these discussions, we reviewed the themes and matched passages until we all agreed on the final outcome.

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Upon group consensus, we came to a final narrative for all participants that appropriately described experiences in college (i.e., the responses to Ques- tion 1) and recommendations to university personnel (i.e., the responses to Question 2). Saturation (Fassinger, 2005) was attained at approximately the midpoint of data analyses for both the African American and Latino groups, which revealed that participants reported vastly different campus experiences and recommendations by ethnic membership. Considering that the number of participants for each of the groups was small, we completed data analyses for the full sample to ensure that no new themes emerged from the data.

Results

Findings involve African American and Latino men’s campus experiences followed by their recommendations for an improved campus environment. Data are pre- sented separately for each group because men’s experiences were vastly different by ethnic membership. For the African American participants, experiences centered on the frequent occurrence of microaggressions; these experiences negatively affected participants’ interactions with individuals and programs on campus. For the Latino participants, they shared both positive and negative elements of being a Latino man on campus. Positive elements involved the availability of social networks through established Latino-centered organizations, whereas negative elements involved a lack of critical information about college and financial hardship.

Racial Tension Affecting African American Men’s Sense of Belonging

African American participants shared how their efforts to connect with others were often not reciprocated, which prevented them from developing positive, supportive relationships. Furthermore, African American participants shared a sense of hostility from others in the college context that went beyond feelings of disconnect with peers. For example, one participant stated,

The alienation. I mean, I was taking classes where there were no Black men. I was taking classes . . . and they [non-Black peers] have a bias . . . they don’t want to help you in classes. Most of the time, I would be out there by myself, and, you know, no help. And the meanness of the people and the hostility.

African American participants reported that the consequence of the lack of con- nection, sometimes reflecting outright hostility, resulted in early departure from the university, minimal development of social networks, and a general sense that they did not belong on campus. With respect to early departure, several African American participants shared how they were returning to higher education; they dropped out during earlier attempts to attend college as a result of feeling “out of place”:

It was the fact that I didn’t have . . . a lot of friends. I didn’t have people to relate to, so I felt alone. Because you want to be accepted, you want to belong to a group. But, yeah, I actually tried college twice, and both times it just didn’t work out.

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Related to a decreased sense of belonging, African American participants shared that the majority of them had very few friends on campus. Furthermore, African American participants shared feelings of loneliness and isolation that they and African American male peers experienced. They shared a sense that African American men did not have substantial social networks, relative to size and emotional depth, as evidenced by their own, as well as their friends’, campus experiences. African American participants further discussed how racial tension fueled their isolation. One participant stated,

I’ve had a lot of social problems in my 3 years in school. You know, I came to college with the enthusiasm that I’d make hundreds of friends. I’d just network continuously. But that wasn’t the case. I actually found it really difficult to meet people and establish relationships with people. It seemed like every time I would establish a relationship with someone it would quickly deteriorate. There’s compatibility issues, there’s that, I guess . . . underlying racial tension; I don’t know if it was negative or anything; it was just an awkward tension. I talked to a psychologist on campus about this problem, and she identified with my problem because I wasn’t the only Black student that brought the issue up.

Recommendation to African American Male Peers: Develop Self-Reliance

Across the board, African American participants did not express expectations that the university should meet their needs as students, let alone as African American college men. Rather, they focused on the need for African American men to become self-reliant. A key finding was that they were warned by other African American men to expect challenges in the college context as a result of their identities as African American men. For example, one participant stated,

They [other African American men] talked about what to expect out here. I guess he [my stepfather] was used to this type of stuff. He told me that I would be deprived. My brother did . . . he experienced some of the same things, but he didn’t pay attention to it. But it wasn’t as bad as what I went through.

Although the question in the interview prompted recommendations directed to campus personnel, African American participants consistently brought at- tention back to the students. They shared the sentiment that African American men must learn to rely solely upon themselves to achieve social and academic success and that such knowledge must occur early in the students’ develop- ment for them to successfully persist in college. In response to Question 2 (i.e., Do you have any recommendations for how this university can better support African American men to be successful in school and graduate?), an African American stated,

I really don’t know a way for African American students to better themselves. I’d say either you got it or you don’t. People usually know when they get to college their 1st year, “Am I gonna make it, Am I gonna break it?”

As demonstrated in this participant’s response, the focus of intervention was on the student, not the university, even when the prompt asked for recommendations directed at the university system.

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Latino Men Carving Out a Place for Themselves on Campus

Latino men’s experiences with a sense of connection to the university were vastly different from those of the African American participants. Latinos described feeling comfortable on campus in relation to the high concentration of ethnically similar peers and the existence of established Greek and civic organizations to uniquely meet their needs as Latino men. Participants expressed that Latino- centered organizations provided social networks that facilitated their sense of belonging and academic progress and were directly linked to their retention in college. Furthermore, Latino-centered organizations, such as fraternities and student organizations, were perceived as symbols that Latinos belonged on campus and also provided them with a network of peer role models and support to complete college. One participant noted,

If we’re thinking about college community, then my [fraternity] brothers [are] where I feel it. They help us. Like right now, I’m struggling with the whole academics and stuff, they’re helping me. We have study hours to try to get each other to advance because that’s what we stand for, and we can’t be seen doing something opposite.

Lack of Critical Information and Resources

A general lack of critical information related to applying to college and negotiating university demands was a theme that ran throughout the Latino data. Latinos shared how they were often unaware of necessary information related to the admissions and financial aid processes and how this lack of information fueled perceptions that higher education was not an appropriate future outlet to them as low-income Latino students. One participant stated, “Latinos don’t have the option to go to college. If they want to go to college, they can’t pursue college . . . our parents don’t make a lot of money.”

Furthermore, the lack of information about financial aid paired with fears of taking on student loan debt were perceived as insurmountable obstacles during high school, regardless of Latino participants’ academic motivation and desire to complete a college degree. Beyond perceptions, Latinos shared the real financial hardship that they faced, which resulted in a high number of hours worked per week. A participant described the economic challenges with which he struggled (i.e., having to negotiate his family’s economic needs and the cost of college attendance):

I have a job, and I’m paying my own schooling. Occasionally, I help out [my family], and eventually, I pay back for like groceries and stuff like that. I know right now is a hard time because people can’t find a job; people are getting laid off and that’s causing more issues. And the students are going to college and parents are laid off without a job. Like, who’s going to pay the bills? It’s a tough time.

Recommendation to Campus Professionals: Create Pathways

Latino students responded to the interview prompt by stressing the impor- tance of providing critical information early. Specifically, Latino participants

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discussed the importance of demystifying higher education and recommended that university staff connect with youth and their families during middle and high school to provide information about the admissions and financial aid processes. Students shared how young Latinos have limited knowledge about what it takes to apply to college, which is related to many parents’ minimal educational attainment, and the need for campus professionals to provide this information. Participants also shared how the lack of knowledge and under- standing of the financial aid process creates a significant barrier to students’ access to college. Latinos’ recommendations involved creating more oppor- tunities for scholarships and grants as well as providing students with critical information to access and navigate higher education. One participants noted, “More resources that can be available to undocumented students and, like, Latinos . . . and more support. I want to see, like, scholarships, yeah financial support. Just create basic access.” Another participant stated,

A friend of mine, he’s taking like extra time now, 5 or 6 years, to graduate because he took a bunch of classes that he didn’t even need to take; he just kind of thought he should take [them]. I think that is something that needs to be made more well known . . . because I think [if you’re an] incoming freshman, and you’re a minority, you need to know how to go about things at school.

Discussion

The intent of this study was to give voice to African American and Latino men’s recommendations for how university personnel could better sup- port their unique needs as college men of color. A central tenet of CRT is recognizing that persons of color hold critical knowledge from their lived experiences with negotiating ethnic and racial minority identities in the United States (Ladson-Billings, 1998; Solorzano & Yosso, 2002; Torre, 2009). We sought to illustrate this tenet by sharing narratives directly from African American and Latino men about their recommendations for how the college context could be a more supportive environment to them. Find- ings differed significantly between groups; African American participants directed recommendations toward African American male students to be- come self-reliant, whereas Latino participants offered recommendations to university personnel related to critical information about higher education and financial assistance.

Although the interview question directly asked about recommendations for college personnel, African American participants focused recommendations toward student peers to highlight the need for African American men to be- come self-reliant, and to do so in the early stages of their college careers. It may be that African American participants had a history of disengagement from academic settings, as a result of individual and institutional microaggressions (Goodman & West-Olatunji, 2010; Villalpando, 2004; Yosso et al., 2009), and arrived to college already having learned that they must be self-reliant to succeed. This explanation is consistent with the ACA (American Counseling

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Association) Advocacy Competencies, which state that counselors should “recognize the signs indicating that an individual’s behaviors and concerns reflect responses to systemic or internalized oppression” (Lewis et al., 2003, p. 1). For our sample, African American men’s focus on self-reliance may reflect a common message that institutions are not built to support the needs of African Americans, and, therefore, individuals should develop their own resources and skills to navigate said institutions.

Another significant finding was African American men’s general feelings of loneliness and isolation on campus and, in a couple of instances, hostility. African American participants indicated frequent occurrences of racial microaggressions and noted how racial tension affected various points of connection and hampered their development of social networks with peers, staff, and faculty, and, in a few circumstances, led them to drop out (or were pushed out) of earlier attempts at college. In line with Smith et al.’s (2007) findings, we found that African American men experience a unique set of challenges at the intersection of racial minority status and gender, which can lead to traumatic psychological stress, also referred to as racial battle fatigue. As both African American and male, African American men contend with African American misandry, defined as anti–African American male attitudes and behaviors in which African American men “are held in suspi- cion, marginalized, hated, rendered invisible, put under increased surveillance” (Smith et al, 2007, p. 558). Our findings support the existence of racial battle fatigue and African American misandry; African American participants experienced recurrent microaggressions that reduced their sense of belonging and access to needed campus services and, as a result, detrimentally affected their persistence attitudes and behaviors.

Unlike the African American participants, Latino participants directed their rec- ommendations toward university personnel. They specifically recommended that personnel initiate contact with Latino families during middle school years to plant a seed in youth’s and parents’ minds that college is a viable future option. A major issue that was unique to the Latino participants was a lack of critical information to successfully access higher education. Latino men shared that having limited knowl- edge about admissions and financial aid was associated with feelings that they did not belong in college. Related to Ostrove and Cole’s (2003) explanation of how social class affects social dynamics in educational contexts, Latino participants came to understand that their limited knowledge about higher education was evidence that college was less appropriate and viable to them as a future trajectory. Con- sidering that the majority of Latinos are the first in their families to attend college (Pew Hispanic Center, 2009), many struggle against limited information, which, in turn, poses barriers to their pursuit of college.

Latino participants also shared the challenges they experienced with balancing academic and work responsibilities and how the need to work was associated with financial needs of the family. Among our participants, gender role socialization may have placed Latino men in a unique position to experience pressure from family, society, and themselves to contribute to the family’s financial health to confirm tenets of caballerismo (a term that is defined as personal responsibility to honor, protect, and serve one’s family and that has been historically linked to

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male gender roles; see Arciniega, Anderson, Tovar-Blank, & Tracey, 2008). Thus, Latino participants may have been especially vulnerable to familial responsibili- ties in the form of financial assistance, and such pressure likely erected barriers to the time spent on academics. Considering the centrality of family for Latino college men and the current economic downturn in the United States, our find- ings may suggest a developing trend in which Latinos are compromising their academic responsibilities to meet the increasing financial needs of their families.

Limitations A limitations of our study was that we interviewed the participants across class standing, so we did not focus on the needs that are unique to lower and/ or upper division African American and Latino men. Our study took place at a public university on the West Coast, where African American and Latino students together composed approximately 26% of the student body. Many campuses have numbers much lower than the campus represented in this study, and, thus, our findings are most relevant to similarly composed campuses. This study was conducted in a qualitative manner, and although we were careful to use a group analysis method that involved consensus to ensure the credibility of our data, there is no denying that our backgrounds and assumptions affected data analysis. Our qualitative research method was exploratory in nature and, therefore, did not allow us to test inferences. The results should be reviewed with judiciousness. Another limitation was that, when we conducted interviews, we assumed that all the participants would be in a conducive environment to consider their needs, evaluate the university’s shortcomings, and be ready and able to provide recommendations to university personnel for an improved campus climate. Our findings suggest that African American participants were not in a conducive space to offer recommendations for change at the university level.

Implications for College Counselors

The results suggest changes that may improve the campus environment for African American and Latino college men. Counselors should work with students of color, specifically men, on a cognitive reframe about student services and how utilizing services may contribute to college success. This could be achieved by making pre- sentations about counseling services during orientations (at the beginning of each year in large, general educational courses) and at major campus events. Counseling centers should also consider hiring student workers for outreach positions (course credit can be used when financial resources are not available) because the counsel- ing centers’ primary objectives are to connect with ethnic student organizations and other campus groups to provide information about counseling services on campus and to serve as a liaison to set up initial intakes and/or counseling sessions.

Counseling centers should partner with student services to support mentoring initiatives in which African American and Latino male students are paired with advanced students, staff, or faculty (see College Board Advocacy & Policy Center, 2010). This is especially relevant for African American and Latino men because research has shown that as Latino men advance in college, they become less likely

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to rely on others for support (Gloria et al., 2009) and that Latino students have reported higher levels of personal stress than did their White peers when they sought out support for academic and/or personal needs (Muñoz, 1986). There- fore, a mentoring program may be a more accessible way for African American and Latino men to receive mental health support. As discussed by Gloria and Rodriguez (2000), college counselors are primed to contribute to mentoring ef- forts because these mentoring services provide the “direct personal and academic support” (p. 151) that counselors are uniquely trained to provide. Specifically, many counselors understand the nuanced experiences of belongingness for stu- dents of color and how diminished belongingness detrimentally affects students’ educational endeavors (Lewis et al., 2003). Thus, counselors can serve as mentors and/or advisers to mentoring efforts and, in doing so, incorporate mental health components that are critical to students’ academic and social success.

A central recommendation for campus mental health counselors is to increase African American and Latino men’s ability to connect with key segments of the university via support services and peer support. Given that African American participants experienced recurrent microaggressions in the college context, it is critical that counselors consider that men may not trust that counselors understand, and are able to meet, their needs (Gloria & Rodriguez, 2000; Harris, 1995). Therefore, it is critical that counseling centers work toward making their staff more accessible to African American and Latino men by hiring men of color, who may symbolize safe individuals and who likely understand the nuanced experiences related to microaggressions and sense of belonging.

Related to making campus more accessible and safe, counselors should provide antiracist training to the wider campus community. Such efforts will improve the campus climate in general and, more specifically, add to the ability of counseling staff to understand and meet the unique needs of African American and Latino college men. Counselors should also encourage men to seek out ethnically similar peers in an effort to form counterspaces where men can receive cultural validation related to the intersection of racial identity and gender, because these spaces are often instrumental to persistence attitudes and behaviors (Solorzano & Yosso, 2002; Yosso et al., 2009).

An interesting finding was that the Latino men in our study, of whom 10 out of 12 did not have families who went to college, were more comfortable with seeking out campus services than African American men were. It may be that Latino men took the services at face value because they had little previous information about them and, thus, did not receive messages that such services would not understand their cultural experiences and needs. In a different vein, seven of the nine African American men in our study had a parent who went to college, so they perhaps received messages about the lack of accessibility of those services. It may be that African American men’s desire to be self-reliant is part of a larger historical narrative about negotiating race and gender in the United States, as noted by CRT (Delgado & Stefancic, 2001; Ladson-Billings, 1998; Solorzano & Yosso, 2002), and is key to negotiating college life. It may be easier for men to forgo services in an effort to avoid receiving negative, sometimes hostile messages that challenge their belongingness on campus. Therefore, counsel-

Journal of College Counseling ■ October 2015 ■ Volume 18 257

ing centers should examine whether the number of African American male students who used counseling services is proportional to their representation on campus and whether this proportion is similar to that of other groups, and they should examine the number of African American men who used counseling but terminated early. Such data may reveal the accessibility of counseling services to African American men and help counseling centers devise a plan to improve their services so that they are equally available to all students on campus.

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