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Ernesto Rivera—From Migrant Worker to Master’s Degree


Faculty Profile


Ernesto Rivera is proud of his past.

From the harvest fields of central California to becoming a counselor at Crafton Hills College, the 36-year-old Beaumont resident and father of three looks fondly at his past when it comes to helping Roadrunners forge a path to higher education.

“I think it’s a surprise when I mention it,” he said by phone. “I’m not ashamed of it at all.”

As a child, Rivera and his family spent six months out of the year living in Calexico, California where his parents worked as migrant workers, a job he’d later take on. Along with a strong work ethic, Rivera’s parents encouraged their children – he is the oldest sibling of three – to get an education. It did not matter what degree their children would pursue, they saw the value in education, Rivera explained.

A first generation-college student, Rivera pursued his bachelor’s at the University of California, Riverside, where he planned to become a teacher. But his experience working for Upper Bound, an on-campus program promoting higher education with an emphasis on working with first-generation college students like himself, changed all that.

From that experience, Rivera would shift gears to counseling and would go on to obtain a master’s in counseling from the University of Redlands and entered the field. He ended up taking a year off from counseling to work as a contractor alongside his father before applying for a gig at Crafton. In Jan. of 2013, Rivera was officially hired as a STEM – Science, Technology, Education and Math – Counselor at CHC and remains an integral part of the counseling department at the college.

“The one thing that intrigued me at Crafton was, it was a small college. I refer to it as ‘The Little Engine That Could’ because I saw so much potential,” he said. “We have an awesome counseling department here and I figured I could have a much bigger impact by coming to a college like this.”

That impact includes working with all populations of students through one-on-one interactions, looking into different ways to reach students both on- and-off campus - such as online counseling, and partnering with Crafton’s “awesome transfer center” and Veterans Resource Center to ensure all student needs are met.

“We do a lot of things – a lot for a little college,” said Rivera, who is now the college’s faculty co-chair for the counseling department, adding although the students he works with come from varied backgrounds, all have one similar trait in common – balancing a busy schedule.

And when it comes to sharing that reality with them, Rivera does not hold back.

“I let them know that there are other students with similar struggles and they’re not the only ones who have work and study, but what they need to do is figure out what’s going to come first,” he said. “Although there are a lot of academic-related questions we are asked, a lot of our success has to do with the personal counseling that goes on. The hook may be academics, but we are here for students to share their fears and help them find a solution.”