WASHINGTON — After three years on the job, Dr. Lorenzo L. Esters says he is leaving his post in August with the same “vigor and excitement” that he first brought to the job of broadening higher education access and opportunities for minority and other underrepresented students.
In September, Esters, who is the vice president for the Office for Access and the Advancement of Public Black Universities at the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU), will assume a newly created position at the historically Black Kentucky State University. As vice president of Student Success and Enrollment Management, Esters will lead a new initiative at Kentucky State aimed at coordinating the university’s efforts to better support students who are largely low-income, first-generation, and who require one or more remedial courses when they enroll.
“This is the population of students that I’ve been talking about for three years,” says Esters, who earned undergraduate and graduate degrees from HBCUs and who was the first in his family to go to college. Prior to joining APLU, Esters was senior adviser to the president of the historically Black Dillard University in New Orleans.
The move, he says, “represents a wonderful opportunity for me to put the things for which I have advocated for here at APLU into action on a local campus; important things like providing access for low-income students and more effectively supporting those students to enhance retention and graduation rates at Kentucky State.”
Kentucky State President Mary Evans Sias who tapped Esters for the new post is the chair-elect of the APLU’s Commission on Access, Diversity, and Excellence, which Esters manages. But once in place at Kentucky State, Esters hinted that he, not Sias, will likely represent the university on the Commission and plans to “be very much engaged.”
At APLU, Esters has been responsible for the broad and sometimes complex task of overseeing public Black universities, advocating for a group of 1890 Land Grant institutions, and overseeing APLU’s Commission on Access, Diversity and Excellence. In addition, his successor will have to create a new Committee on Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSI) “to better serve the growing Hispanic student populations served by APLU member institutions,” according to the Association.
Advocating for HSIs, Esters contends, was always a part of the work that he did, “but it was never included in my title.”
