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SANTA CLARA, Calif., Oct. 17, 2024—Santa Clara University has for the first time received the prestigious Diversity Champion designation from Insight Into Diversity magazine. This honor recognizes the growth, institution-wide support, and success of Santa Clara’s diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts—making it a role model for other institutions of higher learning. 

For the prior three years, Santa Clara was awarded a Higher Education Excellence in Diversity (HEED) Award, recognizing universities that demonstrably pursue the creation of diverse and inclusive environments on campus. Diversity Champions represent the highest-scoring HEED schools. Achieving this designation is a testament to Santa Clara’s success and commitment to welcoming talented students, faculty, and staff from all backgrounds and life experiences to the campus, and to the campus-wide support for sustaining the culture that helps them thrive. 

“Diversity Champions exemplify the top-tier scorers of all HEED award winners. They go well above and beyond the standards for diversity, equity, and inclusion most institutions of higher education set, and at times even exceed their own expectations and goals,” said Lenore Pearlstein, owner and publisher of Insight Into Diversity magazine.

“Becoming a Diversity Champion is truly an honor for Santa Clara University,” said Shá Duncan Smith, Santa Clara’s vice president for inclusive excellence. “It recognizes the hard work we do across our entire campus, with full support at the highest levels, to ensure we are an institution that supports equity, belonging and inclusion for all. It also brings to light areas where we need to continue to build. We are dedicated to the process of continuous improvement as we lean fully into building a more just, humane, and sustainable campus community and society.”

Among the areas of strength at Santa Clara noted by the judges: 

• Notable growth in full-time tenure and tenure-track diversity,  assisted by the College of Arts and Sciences’ successful Race, Inequality, and Social Justice Scholars cluster hires—which supports scholars and expands scholarship in race, social justice, and inequality across disciplines
• An innovative commitment to hiring LGBTQ+ faculty through similar cluster hires
• Commitment to making Santa Clara affordable for talented students from all socioeconomic backgrounds. After Santa Clara applied for HEED, the University announced new Promise aid commitments to meet the full demonstrated financial need starting next year for incoming first-year students who are eligible for Cal Grants and for those admitted from the 40 Cristo Rey Network high schools nationwide. 
• Numerous partnerships to make Santa Clara welcoming and accessible to transfer students, especially from community colleges, including:
  • Expansion of guaranteed-admission agreements with 43 community colleges, ensuring students who meet specific criteria can be admitted to all three of Santa Clara’s undergraduate schools
  • Transfer scholarships
• Commitment and growth in attracting first-generation and Pell-eligible students, who reached 18% and 17%, respectively, of this year’s incoming first year class.
• Commitment to becoming a Hispanic-Serving Institution—with Latiné/x students comprising 21% of the incoming first-year class this year
• Over 90% graduation rates among Hispanic/Latiné/x students and other students of color (especially notable when many schools’ graduation rates dropped after COVID).
• Demonstrated efforts to continuously improve in areas of importance, by studying and understanding the root causes 
• The strong presence in the University’s strategic plan of goals for accessibility; socio-economic and other diversity; and cultural-immersion experiences 
• Plans for partnering with regional universities to make it easier for diverse suppliers to be hired
• Investment in the eight dimensions of wellness for student mental health
• Tracking and progress in the University’s Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (JEDI) strategic planning implementation process

Insight Into Diversity is the oldest and largest diversity-focused publication in higher education. As a recipient of the Diversity Champion designation, Santa Clara will be featured, along with 17 other recipients, in the November/December 2024 issue of the magazine.

To learn more about the HEED Award, visit the magazine website.  

“At Santa Clara University, the commitment to diversity, inclusion, and belonging starts at the top and is pulled through the entire campus,” said Holly Mendelson, co-publisher of Insight Into Diversity. “That’s why you have been recognized as a Diversity Champion.” 

About Insight Into Diversity
Insight Into Diversity magazine is the leader in advancing best practices in DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) in higher education. Through thought-provoking print and online articles, we share expert advice, valuable resources, in-depth profiles of top DEI programs at colleges and universities, headline news, and much more to help keep our readers informed and empower them to advance DEI initiatives at their institutions. To further our mission, we created the Insight Into Diversity Higher Education Excellence in Diversity (HEED) Award in 2012. The HEED Award—including the more targeted Insight Into Diversity Health Professions, Law School, and Community College HEED Awards—is the only national honor to recognize institutions of higher education for their outstanding commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion. Current, archived, and digital issues of Insight Into Diversity magazine are available online at insightintodiversity.com.

About Santa Clara University
Founded in 1851, Santa Clara University sits in the heart of Silicon Valley—the world’s most innovative and entrepreneurial region. The University’s stunningly landscaped 106-acre campus is home to the historic Mission Santa Clara de Asís. Ranked among the top 15 percent of national universities by U.S. News & World Report, SCU has among the best four-year graduation rates in the nation and is rated by PayScale in the top 1 percent of universities with the highest-paid graduates. SCU has produced elite levels of Fulbright Scholars as well as four Rhodes Scholars. With undergraduate programs in arts and sciences, business, and engineering, and graduate programs in six disciplines, the curriculum blends high-tech innovation with social consciousness grounded in the tradition of Jesuit, Catholic education. For more information see www.scu.edu.

Media Contact
Deborah Lohse | SCU Media Communications | dlohse@scu.edu | 408-554-5121