The AA degree in Ethnic Studies is designed to foster individual cultural identity and cr​​oss-cultural communication, develop a consciousness about the American pluralistic society and its origins, and provide basic education regarding professional careers involving intercultural relations in fields such as arts, business education, government, health, law, public relations, and public service.  Emphasis will be be on a cultural survey of Native Americans, Asian Americans, African Americans, and Mexican Americans/Latinos from the Pre-Columbian period to the present and the contributions of  these ethnic groups to U.S. society.  Enrichment and global perspective will be added to majors such as Art, Anthropology, Child Development, Dance, Education, English, Foreign Language, History, Music, Psychology and Sociology.  Completion of the degree program prepares students to pursue a major leading to a baccalaureate degree.

The Department of Ethnic Studies examines the social and historical narratives of those seen as non-American. The Anglo, Caucasian, and WASP ideal of American created a separation where all others encountered and endured the United States nation-building project, which erased the narratives of non-Amer​​​icans. The department's educational principles aspire to expand student social and political horizons and the critical thinking skills vital in comprehensively participating in humanity transnationally. We explore how various kinds of resistance, persistence, liberation struggle, and radical wisdom confront and transform oppressive conditions and create new social change possibilities.

The Ethnic Studies program is committed to centralizing the epistemologies, histories, narratives, and living experiences of disenfranchised/marginalized First people/Indigenous and those seen as non-American from the Anglo, Caucasian, and WASP ideal of American to challenge and critique all structures of despotism, oppression, repression, subjection, suppression and promote emancipatory, self-determining destinies for all people. The Ethnic Studies program aspires to present the intersections of ethnicity, gender, race, and sexuality within the voiced concerns of the four major groups disproportionately affected in the United States: Native Americans, African/Black Americans, Asian Americans, and Chicanas/Chicanos/Latin Americans.

The Department of Ethnic Studies creates course content based on factual conditions of people of color; we also utilize methodologies that accentuate the structural dimensions of social, political, and economic inequalities and struggles used against them. The department dissects the intersectionality of race, racism, and various forms of institutionalized violence. Areas of focus include land conquest, state violence, colonialism, U.S. imperialism, racial genocide, chattel slavery​​, militarization, forced assimilation, legalized discrimination, White supremacy, and the rationale of ethnic/racial domination. The comparative examination of racialization seeks to expose structures of disparity and privilege.