PinoyBuilt — Stories of Filipino America

California • March 2026. UC Santa Cruz Sets Record With 90,867 Applications for Fall 2026 — What Filipino-American Students Need to Know. uc santa cruz admissions 2026, filipino american college, ucsc fall 2026, california university admissions, fil-am students UC. EDUCATION • CALIFORNIA • MARCH 2026 UC Santa Cruz Sets Record With 90,867 Applications for Fall 2026 — What Filipino-American Students Need to Know The "Banana Slugs" are no longer anyone's backup plan. UCSC's historic surge in applications reshapes the college landscape for thousands of Fil-Am families across California. For years, Filipino-American families across the Bay Area, Sacramento, and Southern California treated UC Santa Cruz as the "safe" choice — the fallback when UCLA and Berkeley were out of reach. That calculation just changed. In a cycle defined by a record-shattering surge of interest, UCSC received approxi...

Vallejo, California • September 2016 (Updated March 2026). The Skyrocketing Cost of College in America. college tuition cost, UC Davis cost of attendance, Filipino American college students, fil-am education, higher education costs, ivory tower documentary, college affordability, filipino diaspora education. Education • Vallejo / Bay Area • Updated March 2026 The Skyrocketing Cost of College — And What It Means for Filipino-American Families When a UC Davis Aggie put himself through school in 1985 for $3,500 a year, the American dream felt within reach. Today that same education costs more than $35,000 annually — and the Filipino-American families who bet everything on education are paying the price. UC Davis Mga Kapatid's Pilipino Culture Night 2014 — a generation of Fil-Am students who understand that education is the ultimate inheritance. When I enrolled at UC Davis in 1985, tuition plus room and board ran ...

Grace Asuncion, a pre-med student in UC Berkeley, was stabbed to death in 1992. The 1992 homicide of Grace Asuncion is finally solved On February 7, 1992, Grace Asuncion was a junior in UC Berkeley .  A pre-med student, she was a leader of the Pilipino American Alliance (PAA), the Fil-Am club on campus.  Grace was working on the fifth floor office of PAA at Eshleman Hall.  A custodian found her body, stabbed multiple times in the neck.  She had not been robbed or sexually abused. UC Police Department identified John Iwed , an Alameda County resident who died of a drug overdose less than a year after Asuncion’s death, as the killer. Iwed was a suspect early in the case, but UCPD did not have enough corroborating evidence at the time to charge him. The Assuncion case remained open through the years as UCPD detectives reviewed the case.  Additional statements from key witnesses in recent months and the use of new DNA testing procedures broke the case. UCPD relea...