According to its website, Salt Lake Community College is Utah’s largest college with the most diverse student body.
As part of its efforts to support diversity and inclusivity, SLCC recently added a sexual orientation field to admission applications and student records. The new data will help the college in connecting students to resources and reflect the diversity of LGBTQ+ students in the college’s demographic reporting.
Peter Moosman, the student resource coordinator for the Gender and Sexuality Student Resource Center at South City Campus, talked about how the college has goals to be more inclusive for the LGBTQ+ community yet no way to reach the students.
“When we started the Gender and Sexuality Student Resource Center, we wanted to be able to connect to the students we are serving. We had no structure for that and we had no way to get our message out to all of our students,” Moosman said.
Moving forward, all SLCC students will be able to add their sexual orientation to their admissions form.
“We wanted to find a way that would help us connect with our LGBT students in a way that everyone had the opportunity to answer that question to collect the data for everybody,” Moosman said. “In this position, running the GSSRC, I wanted to challenge [the college] by saying, ‘If we are going to talk about being the most diverse college in Utah we need to own that and be the most diverse.’”
Ana Colina, a sophomore at SLCC said, “I think we need more representation and to be more inclusive of people. We need to make them feel valid and important and so they know that they can feel accepted at SLCC.”
The sexual orientation field is currently part of all new student applications. New students and concurrent enrollment students who have already completed their admissions forms are able to update their demographic information.
Current students who want to add sexual orientation information to their records can contact the GSSRC for assistance.
