UNLV celebrates "MSI Week" on March 25-29, 2024. But do you know your MSI and the alphabet soup of acronyms and eligibility criteria? Do you still get stumped? Join Kristine Jan C. Espinoza, Ph.D. Candidate in Higher Education, for an overview of Minority-Serving Institutions (MSI) in the United States. This session will especially highlight the Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander-Serving Institution (AANAPISI) and Hispanic-Serving Institution (HSI) designations that UNLV holds and why it’s important to uplift what these designations mean.

Admission is free and CEUs are available for those attending the live event. A recording of the event will be available online.

Speaker

Kristine Jan Cruz Espinoza - Graduate Assistant & Doctoral Candidate from the Department of Educational Psychology, Leadership, and Higher Education

Kristine Jan C. Espinoza is a Ph.D. Candidate studying Higher Education and completing a graduate certificate in Program Evaluation and Assessment at UNLV. Her research interests revolve around equity implications of race-based higher education policies, currently focusing on Minority-Serving Institutions (MSIs; i.e., Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander-Serving Institutions (AANAPISIs) and Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs)) and racial data classification. Kristine serves as one of two student members on the National AANAPISI Steering Committee and as an inaugural member of UNLV’s MSI Student Council. As part of her MSI Student Council initiative, she advocated for the collection of disaggregated racial data in UNLV undergraduate and graduate admissions applications, which went into effect for Fall 2023 admits. She spoke about the importance of the disaggregation of racial data on Nevada NPR’s Exit Spring Mountain podcast in an episode titled after her MSI Student Council initiative (“Count Us In”). Previously, Kristine worked full-time as the Student Affairs Officer in the UCLA Asian American Studies Department. She attended Long Beach City College and transferred to the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa where she earned her B.A. in Biology, B.A. in Anthropology, and M.Ed. in Educational Administration.