Philip Lantz is Counseling Faculty at Santa Monica College. Currently a tenure track counseling faculty within the General Counseling and Transfer Services office, his role focuses on working with community college students with a range of educational goals, including personal and professional development, degree and certificate attainment, and transfer to colleges and universities. His work involves projects that provide intentional support services to first year, Black and Latinx students at the college, and additional populations he has worked with specifically include current and former foster youth, LGBTQ+ and homeless students. He also has a passion for onboarding and training new counseling faculty.
Philip applied to LMU's Ed.D. Program because of its focus on social justice. He is a fierce advocate for the transformational work being done at the community colleges in California and sees his work as a counseling faculty as being intertwined with social justice values that promote diversity and equity in higher education. He believes the Ed.D. Program prepares professionals for leadership in any role they play in education, and he hopes to use this degree to continue promoting social justice approaches in higher education through additional research and by intentionally supporting new generations of counseling faculty as they begin their careers.
Philip’s dissertation, “Reimagining the Onboarding and Mentoring Needs of California Community College Counseling Faculty: An Ecological Systems Approach Using Narrative Inquiry,” chaired by Yvette Lapayese, Ph.D., focused on filling gaps in the existing literature by examining the onboarding and mentoring experiences of California community college counseling faculty. At a time when California is looking to close equity gaps in community college student success data, the perspectives of counseling faculty, who are uniquely positioned on campus to support students, can play a key role in better understanding the holistic needs of community college students. Philip’s goal is to use his research to provide recommendations to campus leaders to reconsider how they can more adequately support faculty members working with diverse student populations.
For Philip, the Ed.D. Program gave him tangible tools to become a research-practitioner that is capable of using relevant data to enhance his decision-making in his role as a counseling faculty member. As a student, he was able to immediately apply both the theoretical frameworks and the practical skills covered throughout the program. The program also equipped him with new ways to question existing structures while working toward systemic changes for the students who come to his college to pursue their goals. As a result, he feels empowered to advocate for the needs of students and the staff and faculty who support them. In addition to being a community college counseling faculty, he is a proud alumni of a California Community college—he attended El Camino College in Torrance, which allowed him to get his first exposure to the incredible work being done within the community college system.