Dr. Rica Toribio serves as the Vice President of Strategic Enrollment at Pacifica.  As foreign-born Filipino immigrant, Dr. Toribio has personally experienced and continue to behold the plight of underrepresented communities in California collegiate campuses. She had to navigate the US higher education system as a new arrival inchoately needing to acculturate into its new milieu. During her undergraduate studies at UCLA, she was able to observe fellow Filipino Americans, seeing their scholarly trajectories based on their socioeconomic backgrounds and their parents’ level of education, but without acknowledgement of their academic or extra-curricular achievements that could be attributed to their ethnicity or culture, since Filipinos have become cultural straddlers because of the decades of western influence. She has therefore devoted her professional and scholastic endeavors to streamlining administrative processes to allow for a multitude of ethnic voices to be heard and represented, as well as to allow an understanding of the necessity to diverge from panethnic labeling that elicit misguided assumptions about specific groups. She received her Bachelor’s in English Literature at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA); her Master’s in English Literature at California State University, Los Angeles (CSULA); and her Doctoral in Educational Leadership at California State Polytechnic University Pomona.