Shari Cunningham

Shari M. Cunningham, M.S., is a Ph.D. candidate in the higher education program at Rutgers University Graduate School of Education and program assistant for the McNair Program. Before joining Rutgers doctoral program, Shari worked in Financial Aid for eight years in various positions including Data Coordinator/ Educational Opportunity Fund liaison, Financial Aid Counselor, and Assistant Director of Financial Aid. She currently serves as a student representative for the Dean’s Advisory Council at Rutgers School of Graduate Studies. Shari holds a Bachelors in American Studies with a double minor in History and Political Science, a Master’s of Science in Business from the College of Saint Elizabeth, and a Master of Philosophy in Education from Rutgers University. For her Business master’s thesis “The Urban Underclass,” she explored how college students from the Educational Opportunity Fund pipeline program navigated higher education utilizing college resources in the 21st century. As an emerging scholar with a passion for historical analysis, she conducted archival research, written and presented on the history of the 19th-century Colored school of Newark, New Jersey. She is also published as a contributing author in two chapters of the forthcoming book Scarlet and Black volume II, the continuation of Rutgers reconciliation project which grapples with minoritized populations affected by the university’s colonial lineage.