ConnectEd Foundation
Education | Research | Equity | Community
ConnectEd Foundation is a non-profit organization registered in California, United States. Our mission is to promote equality in education, cultivate next-generation scholars, and help students from diverse backgrounds to thrive in academia. To serve our mission, we collaborate with professors, researchers, and scientists in well-known universities and organize online presentations, workshops, interviews and social events with diverse audience. Through these events, we help professors to increase the visibility of their research and reach out to students who share similar research interests. Meanwhile, the academic and social events enable us to build an inclusive, diverse and supportive academic community and break the invisible ceiling caused by disadvantaged cultural, social and economical status. With all these efforts, we hope to bridge the gap between academic resources and disadvantage student population, and ensure all students who are passionate about research can pursue their dreams and thrive in academia.
Why is this important?
While academia is profiled as the institution of knowledge, rationality, and truth reached through merit, critical scholars identified it as an inequality regime (Bourabain, 2021; Arday, 2021). A plethora of problems within higher education repeatedly reinforce the racist structure, inequality, and discrimination (Arday, 2021; Dupree & Boykin, 2021; McKay & Devlin, 2016; ). Indeed, research suggests that students from disadvantaged backgrounds are less likely to persist or to attend graduate school. This vulnerable population includes students from low SES families (Walpole, 2003), students of color (Dupree & Boykin, 2021; Naylor et al., 2015; Perna, 2004), female students (O’Meara et al., 2018), first-generation college students (NCES 2018), and international students (Zhou, 2010).