Building Knowledge for CSULB and Beyond
Through its bold initiatives that engage the values and priorities of our university, the College of Liberal Arts actively finds ways to enrich our development of knowledge and skills for the Long Beach region and beyond. This past academic year, the college advanced numerous projects that bolster the goals CSULB set out to achieve through Beach 2030. Among them: Innovative partnerships and strategic graduate recruitment efforts — projects that promote intellectual achievement, a tenet of CSULB’s Beach 2030 mission.
The Long Beach Guaranteed Income Pilot Program is a two-year research endeavor to evaluate the efficacy of the Long Beach Pledge – a guaranteed income program launched city-wide. In the College of Liberal Arts, a research team is working in partnership with the city, tasked with assessing the potential for such programs to improve the economic conditions, health, and well-being of the Long Beach community.
In another collaboration with the City of Long Beach, the CLA Office of Economic Research has been tackling economic mobility in researching the Long Beach Economic Recovery Program. This two-year project, launched in 2023, is tracking the city’s economic recovery after the downturn associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. Principle investigators from CSULB — CLA Associate Dean Seiji Steimetz and economics lecturers Megan Anaya and Robert Kleinhenz — have been charged with providing comprehensive, quarterly economic reports to the city’s Economic Development Department, Economic Development Commission, and the city council.
Through these innovative partnerships with the City of Long Beach, CLA faculty, staff, and administrators are working to advance the university’s community engagement and its role in the broader economic, civic, workforce, and cultural priorities of our region.
Amplifying student learning remains another cornerstone of CSULB’s strategic priority focused on promoting intellectual achievement. The Graduate Equity Scholars Program, a targeted graduate recruitment effort to promote greater diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility in all CLA graduate programs, represents a meaningful example of efforts that work toward this mission.
The program supports a one-year assistantship for every CLA department to recruit a promising student into the Liberal Arts. Providing underrepresented undergraduate students a role model at CSULB is just one of many benefits this recruitment effort has spawned. Uplifting the graduate community and contributing to future access and equity represent others. At the same time, the Graduate Equity Scholars offers an innovative way to generate a preferential pathway for our talented CSULB undergraduates seeking graduate degrees, and contributes to faculty pipeline and local, regional, and state professional pipelines.
As we strive to use research, scholarship, and creative activities to advance academic achievement at CSULB, the College of Liberal Arts is helping establish our university’s leadership in an economy and society where knowledge is key.
