YORBA LINDA, Calif. – On a recent Thursday in August, 22-year-old Areeba Kaukab met us at Jessamyn Park in Yorba Linda. 

Kaukab grew up in Orange County, so when she started classes at Cal State Fullerton last fall, her biggest surprise was how diverse the campus was.

“I walked into my first class my fall semester of '19 and there was another hijabi in the class with me that I didn’t know, which has never happened before. It’s something that you didn’t know you were missing until it happens,” she said.

Kaukab, who is Pakistani and Bangladeshi, says the diversity in her school has helped her feel included and given her newfound confidence. What she didn’t realize was that attending a more diverse CSU campus, would mean less funding for her education.

“I’ve experienced being a little allocated differently just being misplaced, so seeing the money being misplaced in that manner, or being given to white people more than people of color was just kind of not a surprise to me,” Kaukab said.

Cal State Fullerton professor Dr. Jon Bruschke felt the same way.

“When I saw the numbers come out I gotta say I was not surprised,” said Dr. Bruschke.

Bruschke is a fixture at CSU Fullerton. He's not only been a faculty member there for the last 23 years, but he got his undergrad and master’s degrees there. He says it’s an open secret there are differences in funding among the CSUs, but until this summer he hadn’t done the math.

“When I was done, every way I could look at the data produced the same conclusion, which is that race is playing a factor in the funding or at least the funding is producing a disparate racial impact. And your questions was, 'How did I react to that?' And I guess I thought it would be more confusing than it was,” said Dr. Bruschke.

In a report he published on Medium, Bruschke alleges that the decades old formula the Cal State system uses is funding schools with a greater percentage of white students at higher levels than schools with more diverse populations. Leaving institutions like Fullerton with $500 to $800 less per student, according to Bruschke. 

“The more and more you get squeezed the less and less you invest in faculty, in lowering class sizes in getting tenured faculty and it’s palpable, you can feel it,” he said.

We reached out to the Chancellor’s office for comment, Toni Molle the Director of Public Affairs sent us the following statement: 

“The CSU is committed to providing a high-quality education for all students regardless of ethnicity and one of our highest priorities university-wide is the elimination of opportunity and equity gaps. The university’s Graduation Initiative 2025 aims to do exactly that and over the past few years funding to campuses with higher Pell-eligible populations has increased in an effort to achieve that goal. Additionally, as the university’s state funding was reduced by $300 million for the coming year, those same campuses received smaller proportional cuts in an effort to reduce the impact on students who come from traditionally underserved populations.”

Dr. Bruschke says he doesn’t think it’s intentional.

“I do think it’s an inherited problem, but that doesn’t make it less urgent. We’ve all inherited the problems of our past the question is, what do we want to do about it?”

Kaukab already knows what she wants to do about it.

“I want to work with non-profit organizations and I want to make the waves for equality as much as I can,” she said. 

She is scheduled to graduate May of 2021.