By Michael Burke for EdSource
Originally published on March 6, 2026
After working more than 50 years in higher education, including stints as president of Los Angeles Mission College and Moreno Valley College, Monte Perez was enjoying retirement in 2024. That’s when he received a call from Francisco Rodriguez, then the chancellor of the Los Angeles Community College District.
Rodriguez wanted to know if Perez, 78, was willing to step in as the interim president of East Los Angeles College, the district’s largest college enrolling about 38,000 students.
Perez, who is from East Los Angeles, wanted to help his hometown campus in Monterey Park, which serves much of the San Gabriel Valley in addition to East LA. Perez grew up in the City Terrace neighborhood of East LA, attended Garfield High School and earned his bachelor’s degree from California State University, Los Angeles, located just 3 miles from East LA College.
He said yes to Rodriguez and initially planned to stick around only until the campus found a permanent leader. But things changed after Donald Trump was inaugurated as president of the United States and his administration began attacking higher education, including ordering colleges to eliminate all diversity, equity and inclusion programs and threatening mass deportation, putting many East LA students and their families at risk.
“I felt compelled, with my experience and longevity in community colleges, that I was needed,” he said.
Perez shed the interim tag in January, when he was named the president of East LA College. He recently spoke with EdSource about his plans. The following has been edited for length and clarity.
What does it mean to you to be president of East LA College?
For me, this is coming home. I was born and raised in East Los Angeles. I’m a product of public schools in East Los Angeles and I went to Cal State LA. Pretty much all of my formative years were there.
So it means everything. Especially right now, with higher education under attack. Academic freedom is an issue. We know that the federal government has issues with diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility. And we in California and in particular, the LA Community College District, we support DEIA.
You mentioned that you want to support undocumented students and students who are fearful of immigration raids. Why is that important to you?
We have about 1,000 undocumented students. They’re afraid to come on campus. I want to make sure that they feel welcomed, embraced and that our campus is a safe campus. Meaning if they come on campus, they do not have to worry about any raids.
Our policy is, if ICE does show up, they’re notified to go to the office of the president. And then my role as president is to make sure that [ICE agents] have the appropriate judicial warrants. And if they do, then we comply. If they do not, then we can say to them that we don’t need to comply.
Fortunately, we haven’t had any major intrusion on the campus. But our students are still very concerned, along with their families. We’ve had activity in public areas right off campus.
So I wanted to be there as a leader to assure the students that we’re here for you. And the same thing with our LGBTQ students. We want them to feel safe and for our employees to feel safe.
What types of things are you doing to support them?
We offer our students information about legal rights for them and their families. We have a partnership with the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, an organization that assists immigrants.
We also have what we call the Dream Resource Center, which is funded by the state and which serves the undocumented population, offering them counseling, mental health support and financial support.
We also know that some students might get deported and will need support wherever they get deported. So we’re already making contact with universities in Mexico, including the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. We’re letting them know we have students who might need access to their computer labs, so they can do online instruction and keep taking their East LA classes.
A number of community colleges have seen Hispanic-Serving Institution grants eliminated by the Trump administration. Was that the case for your campus?
We had a $3 million grant that was cut. We were able to continue a one-year extension, so we extended it through 2026, but it was supposed to go to 2030, so that was cut.
It was a grant focused on apprenticeships in the area of math and science and we partnered with certain companies. We’re going to go ahead and backfill that with state money if it’s available, and we think it will be. And the community colleges across the state are pushing very hard for the state to fund a block grant for Hispanic-Serving Institutions. That would be helpful.
We’re also looking at philanthropic activities to support it. It’s very important for us to continue.
Baccalaureate degree attainment is lower in the region your campus serves than the state average. Is that something you want to help improve?
Of course. It can be higher. We want to focus our attention to persistence, completion, transfer, graduation and equity gaps. How are females doing? How are the males doing? How are African Americans doing? How are Latinos doing? And how are we doing modality-wise? Are we being successful with remote online education versus in-person or hybrid? We want to figure out what’s working, what’s not.
We know that males are not doing well, particularly Black and brown males. Latino males, African American males are not doing well. They’re not persisting from the fall semester to the spring semester. We’re also not transferring like we should be transferring.
So yes, we could do better. And we see proven models. We know best practices have been identified. Now we have to make them scalable.
Do you have an example of something that has worked?
We have really wonderful results for our Extended Opportunity Program and Services students. It’s a state-funded program for low-income students and they get financial assistance, dedicated counseling, individualized tutoring and vouchers for books. They do much better than similar students who are not in EOPS.
But they have to be full-time students. Many of our students are part time. They’re working or they have family obligations. We understand that. Is there a way we can get more students to be full time? A lot of it has to do with scheduling of courses in a way that students can still work and go full time. We know that they get better financial aid and complete faster with EOPS. So, is there a way we can scale it up for more of the population? That’s what we’re going to try to do.
Enrollment at East LA has been increasing but is still below pre-pandemic levels. How would you evaluate enrollment?
We want to increase it. I feel good that we’re on an upward trend. If you compare fall of 2025 to fall of 2024 and fall of 2023, everything is trending up. But are we where we want to be? The answer is no. We need to continue because we know the population is out there that wants higher ed.
MONTE PEREZ
Age: 78
Education: B.A. in Social Science Government from California State University, Los Angeles; master’s and Ph.D. in Public Policy and Administration from the University of Southern California.
Student leader-turned-administrator: “I was a student activist. I participated in walkouts as a high schooler and college student. At Cal State LA, I was involved with the formation of the Education Opportunity Program. That’s what propelled me into higher education.”
First job in higher education: Assistant director of admissions at Stanford University, from 1969-71