From the issue dated November 28,
2003
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v50/i14/14a00801.htm
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Academe's Hispanic FutureThe nation's largest minority group faces
big obstacles in higher education, and colleges struggle to find the right ways
to help
By PETER SCHMIDT
If they haven't already, college
professors and administrators should try to get accustomed to pronouncing names
like Alejandro, Jorge, Nuria, and Pilar.
Hispanics have become the
largest minority group in the United States and now represent about 13 percent
of the country's population. They account for about half of the population
growth in recent years and are expected, given immigration and their relatively
high fertility rates, to represent a much larger share of the population and
work force in years to come. Of the 5.6 million additional school-age children
projected to be living in the United States in 2025, some 5.2 million, or 93
percent, will be Hispanic, the U.S. Census Bureau says.
Along with
growing rapidly, the nation's Hispanic population is spreading out, quickly
moving into communities in the South and Midwest where few Hispanics had settled
before.
As they show up on campuses, Hispanic students are having a
profound influence from the Mexican border to Minnesota, from California to the
Carolinas.
In the past decade more than 240 colleges have been designated
"Hispanic-serving institutions" by the federal government, meaning that at least
a quarter of their enrollment is Hispanic and more than half of their students
come from low-income backgrounds. While 49 of the institutions are in Puerto
Rico, California has 73; Texas, 38; New Mexico, 20; and Arizona, Florida,
Illinois, and New York each have at least 10. Others are located in Colorado,
Massachusetts, New Jersey, Oklahoma, Oregon, and Washington. The list grows by
about a half-dozen colleges each year.
"Relatively speaking, we are the
newest kid on the higher-education block," says Antonio R. Flores, president of
the Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities, which represents
Hispanic-serving institutions.
The federal government did not classify
colleges as "Hispanic-serving" until 1992. By contrast, historically black
colleges and universities date back to 1837. Now some Hispanic-serving
institutions, especially in Texas, have such large Hispanic enrollments that
they are seeking to make the education of those students a key part of their
mission and identity, and they are looking to historically black colleges and
universities as potential models, Mr. Flores says.
Many other colleges
are establishing new courses geared toward Hispanic students; aggressively
trying to recruit Hispanic students, faculty members, and administrators; and
overhauling their admissions practices and student services to be more attentive
to Hispanic needs. Meanwhile, the Bush administration says it is committed to
helping more Hispanics get into college.
'Black and White
Paradigm'
There is still plenty of room for improvement. Hispanic
students remain severely underrepresented and underserved in higher
education.
Colleges have made some progress. Since 1980, the number of
Hispanics enrolled in colleges has more than tripled, to nearly 1.5 million,
outpacing the rate of Hispanic population growth, which has more than doubled to
about 38.8 million. Hispanics' share of all bachelor's degrees awarded has risen
from about 2.3 percent to about 6.2 percent.
But though Hispanics
represent about 18 percent of the college-age population, they account for just
9.5 percent of all students at the nation's higher-education institutions, and
just 6.6 percent of enrollments at four-year colleges.
Over all,
Hispanics are the least-educated major racial or ethnic group. Just 11 percent
of those over the age of 25 have a bachelor's degree, compared with about 17
percent of black, 27 percent of white, and 47 percent of Asian-American adults
in the same age bracket. More than two-fifths of Hispanic adults over 25 never
graduated from high school, and more than one-fourth have less than a
ninth-grade education.
In terms of overall Hispanic educational
attainment, "we were doing better in the '70s than we are in the 21st century,"
says Raul Yzaguirre, president of the National Council of La Raza, one of the
nation's largest Hispanic-advocacy groups.
In many parts of the country,
colleges' efforts to serve minority populations remain focused almost solely on
black students, even where local Hispanic populations are burgeoning.
In
Atlanta, the Hispanic population increased nearly tenfold, to about 290,000,
during the 1990s. But Hispanics account for just a dozen of the 1,900 students
enrolled at Atlanta Metropolitan College, which has a 95-percent-black student
body. Harold E. Wade, the college's president, says predominantly Hispanic
neighborhoods have cropped up "within walking distance" of his two-year public
institution, but "a lot of Hispanic youngsters who have migrated into this area
have not reached college age yet," and their parents don't enroll because they
"have come here to work and to take care of families here and in
Mexico."
Throughout the nation, "we are still seeing education through a
black and white paradigm," Mr. Yzaguirre says. Hispanic students, he says, "are
not being given the proper priority."
Hispanic men remain especially
underserved. A report issued by the American Council on Education last month
found that between the late 1970s and the late 1990s, the college-participation
rate for Hispanic men remained essentially unchanged, at 31 percent. For
Hispanic women, the college-participation rate increased from 27 percent to 37
percent.
Swimming Against the Tide
Several trends in higher
education may be making it even harder for Hispanics to get a college
education:
- Last year loans accounted for nearly 70 percent of all federal financial
assistance available to college students, up from about 56 percent two decades
ago. Raymund A. Paredes, vice president for programs at the Hispanic
Scholarship Fund, the nation's largest private provider of scholarships to
Hispanic students, says the shift from grants to loans "is having a very
serious impact on the Latino community," which is relatively poor and leery of
taking on debt. Many more Hispanics would be attending college if they could
get grants rather than loans, and many more would pursue advanced degrees "if
they could get out from under this debt that they incur as undergraduates," he
says.
- Given their relatively high rate of poverty, Hispanic students have been
hit hard by the stiff increases in public-college tuition and the cuts in
state financial aid that have come in recent years.
- Because many Hispanics inhabit the nation's fastest-growing regions (and
are driving much of that growth), they are especially likely to live near
colleges that have been resorting to enrollment caps to hold down costs. They
are also disproportionately likely to be turned away when colleges raise their
admissions standards to curtail enrollment growth or bolster their own
reputations, since the standardized-test scores of Hispanics tend to be
significantly lower than those of whites.
- Legal and political assaults on affirmative action may also be taking a
toll on Hispanic enrollment. Wherever selective colleges have been forced to
limit or abandon their use of race- and ethnicity-conscious admissions, the
result has been an immediate drop in the share of Hispanic applicants they
accept. Hispanic enrollment has rebounded somewhat when colleges have
aggressively used alternatives to affirmative action, such as considering
socioeconomic status or automatically admitting those near the top of their
high-school classes. But the effectiveness of such policies toward ensuring
Hispanic access, especially in graduate and professional schools, remains in
dispute.
In the past two years, legal challenges have also been
mounted against scholarship, internship, and academic-support programs reserved
specifically for minority students. Several colleges have either abandoned the
programs or opened them up to all races and ethnicities, based on their lawyers'
advice that the programs are legally vulnerable.
Leaks in the
Pipeline
Policy analysts often speak of the various sectors of
education as pieces of a pipeline. At every stage of that pipeline, Hispanic
students are getting stuck or spilling out.
Their problems begin in their
early years, when many Hispanic children receive little exposure to English, and
they are much likelier than white children and nearly as likely as black
children to be living in poverty. Several studies have shown that the schools
they enter tend to be some of the nation's most segregated and poorly financed,
and are more likely than others to be staffed by teachers with little experience
in their fields.
By the age of 17, Hispanic high-school students, on
average, have the same reading and mathematics skills as white 13-year-olds.
More than a third of the states recently surveyed by the National Center for
Education Statistics said that their Hispanic students were significantly more
likely than others to drop out of school. And those who earned their diplomas
were less likely than their white peers to have taken rigorous
college-preparatory courses such as Algebra II and chemistry, according to a
report issued last month by the Education Trust, a nonprofit research and
advocacy organization based in Washington, D.C.
"The curriculum matters
hugely," says Paul Ruiz, one of the Education Trust's chief researchers. "A
robust curriculum is the single greatest predictor of college
success."
It is not that Hispanic families fail to see the value of
education. Family surveys conducted by the Education Department show that more
than 9 out of 10 Hispanic parents expect their children to attend college
-- a figure in line with the results for both black and white parents. But
Hispanic children are much less likely than white children to have a parent who
attended college.
"It is absolutely the case that they have parental
support, but they don't have anybody in the family who really knows the ropes,"
says Tomás A. Arciniega, president of California State University at
Bakersfield, which has an enrollment that is about 36 percent Hispanic, and
serves the children of many Mexican and Central American migrant workers
employed by local farms and food-processing plants. Like many colleges, his
institution is collaborating with the local community-college district and
public schools to try to get more Hispanic children to go on to
college.
The educational problems of Hispanic Americans don't end at the
college door. Hispanic freshmen are less likely than white students to progress
to upper-division courses, and Hispanic students who make it to their third year
of college are less likely to earn bachelor's degrees, according to the
Inter-University Program for Latino Research, a national consortium of 18
Hispanic-focused research centers.
On the whole, Hispanic students are
far likelier than white students to be enrolled in two-year colleges, to be
working to support themselves or their families, or attending college part time
-- choices that they often can't help making but that reduce their chances
of ever earning bachelor's or advanced degrees.
"The biggest challenge
that these kids have to face is, How do they balance what they see as their
responsibility to help out at home now that they are young adults and, at the
same time, follow their dream of going on to college?" says Mr. Arciniega. He
routinely urges faculty and staff members to sit down with students who also
work and convince them of how much more money they will earn in a lifetime with
a degree.
"We are constantly hitting on the note that college is
important," he says.
Only black students have a worse college-graduation
rate than Hispanics, and Hispanics have the lowest rate of graduate-school
enrollment of any major racial and ethnic group. At the very end of the
educational pipeline, Hispanics earn just 4 percent of the doctorates awarded by
colleges. A report issued last month by the American Council on Education says
that the number of Hispanics earning doctorates or professional degrees actually
declined slightly in recent years.
Those statistics help explain why
Hispanics account for just 2.9 percent of full-time college faculty members and
just 3.2 percent of college administrators.
Repairs in just a few
segments of the education pipeline could produce significant increases in the
number of Hispanics earning degrees, according to the Inter-University Program
for Latino Research. In a 2001 report, it crunched the numbers and determined
that if Hispanic high-school students earned their diplomas and went on to
four-year colleges at the same rate as white students, the result -- all
other things remaining equal -- would be a 25-percent increase in the
number who earn bachelor's degrees each year. Increases of 12 percent in the
number of baccalaureates annually awarded to Hispanics could be produced by
ensuring that those in two-year colleges transfer to four-year colleges at the
same rate as white students, or by ensuring that those who are freshmen at
four-year colleges graduate at the same rate as white students.
Among the
institutions that have mounted concerted efforts to retain Hispanic students is
Lehman College of the City University of New York system, which has about a
47-percent Hispanic enrollment. It operates a program that keeps freshmen
together in groups of 25 to 30 to provide one another with support. The faculty
members involved share information about particular students and seek to
integrate the curriculums of their respective classes so that students in an
English-composition class can be working on assignments that they can turn in to
their sociology professor.
"This program is costly because you have to
pay faculty for additional hours of meetings with each other and with students,"
Ricardo R. Fernandez, president of Lehman College, says. But, he says, "the
students like it," and he is confident that the program keeps many from dropping
out during their crucial first year.
St. Philip's College, a public
two-year institution in San Antonio, Tex., has the distinction of being
classified as both historically black and Hispanic-serving, with an enrollment
that is about a fifth black and half Hispanic. Angie S. Runnels, its president,
says Hispanic students there clearly benefit from support services developed for
black students, such as tutoring programs; instructional laboratories focused on
reading, writing, and mathematics; and an approach to student advising that
disperses counselors into academic divisions and departments to ensure adequate
guidance.
"We are particularly interested in students who are the first
generation in their families to experience college," Ms. Runnels
says.
Partly because they offer night classes and training for specific
jobs, the nation's for-profit colleges have proved especially adept at
recruiting and retaining Hispanic students, even though they often charge more
than public higher-education institutions.
Many experts on Hispanic
college students believe that their educational attainment would improve,
especially in graduate and professional schools, if they were more willing to
travel long distances to colleges well suited to meet their needs. "An emphasis
on close family ties is one characteristic shared by most Latinos regardless of
national origin or income, and among Latino immigrants this often translates
into an expectation that children will live with their parents until they
marry," says a report by the Pew Hispanic Center.
A Diverse
Group
Despite their linguistic and cultural similarities, the
nation's Hispanic residents are very diverse. Experts on educating them
generally agree that getting a larger proportion through college will require
focusing on educational differences that the collective term "Hispanic" now
masks.
For instance, Cuban-Americans ages 18 to 24 are slightly more
likely than white students their age to be enrolled in college, and 90 percent
attend full time, more than any other racial or ethnic group. They are also
about as likely as white students to go on to graduate school. In contrast,
Mexican-American students in that age bracket are about half as likely as their
Puerto Rican or Cuban-American peers to be attending two-year
colleges.
Puerto Ricans, many of whom travel back to the island often or
for extended periods, as family or work needs dictate, can have distinct
educational needs tied to their mobility. "You can have a kid who will start in
Puerto Rico in September and be in New York in November," says Felix V. Matos
Rodriguez, director of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter
College.
"It all depends on what circumstances they come here for," says
Eduardo J. Padrón, president of Miami Dade College, where the enrollment is
two-thirds Hispanic. "If they come here as a result of political circumstances,
what you find is that some of them are better prepared than our native students.
If the immigration is economic immigration, what you find is that most of these
people come with a lack of knowledge of the culture and language. Even in their
own language, they are not well prepared."
It also matters greatly
whether Hispanic students or their parents were born in the United States or
abroad.
Statistics that represent Hispanics as a group often are severely
skewed by the foreign-born, who account for about 40 percent of the overall
Hispanic population. One example: On average, Hispanic males 25 and older have
10.6 years of schooling. When immigrants are taken out of the equation, however,
Hispanics' educational attainment rises to 12 years.
About 44 percent of
adult Hispanic immigrants dropped out of school before getting their high-school
diplomas, compared with about 15 percent of those born here. More than half of
foreign-born Hispanic children who had dropped out of schools in their native
lands never set foot in schools in the United States.
The Pew Hispanic
Center has found that foreign-born Hispanic teenagers are more likely than other
immigrants their age to have come to the United States to work rather than
study. They earn a lot more money than black people and white people their age
-- a reflection of long hours rather than high pay -- and they're a
key source of low-skilled, low-wage labor for agriculture and other industries.
Because the nation's immigration policies place a heavy emphasis on bringing in
the family members of legal U.S. residents, the current influx of the poor and
uneducated props open the door for immigration by people with similar
backgrounds.
"America needs a highly educated work force, but we have an
immigration policy that is importing huge numbers of undereducated immigrants,"
says David Ray, a spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform,
a nonprofit advocacy group in Washington. "You get a cheap, exploitable employee
for the business owner, and an additional tax burden for the American
worker."
When Hispanic families come here illegally, paying for college
can be especially tough. Many states' public colleges require undocumented
immigrants to pay the same, comparatively high tuition as nonresidents, although
a few states, including California, New York, and Texas, have agreed in recent
years to let them pay in-state rates. They are ineligible for federal financial
aid for college, and for many scholarships and grants awarded by colleges and
private foundations.
"A lot of donors are uncomfortable about helping
undocumented students," says Mr. Paredes of the Hispanic Scholarship Fund, which
provided more than $26-million in aid to more than 7,500 Hispanic college
students during the 2002-3 academic year.
The educational prospects
improve substantially for the U.S.-born children of Hispanic immigrants, who
account for about 28 percent of the total Hispanic population and attend college
at the same rate as whites.
That is especially true of people whose
families came here from the Dominican Republic. Ramona Hernandez, director of
the Dominican Studies Institute at City College, in New York, says she believes,
based on personal experience and anecdotes, that Dominican immigrants place an
exceptionally high value on education.
"I used to show off my books on
the train," says Ms. Hernandez. "I wanted people to see I was going to college.
I wanted to share that information on the subway train as I was commuting from
Lehman College to my home in the Bronx."
As with other immigrant groups,
members of the so-called "second generation" of Hispanics -- the U.S.-born
children of the foreign-born -- tend to have a fire in the belly that makes
them achieve at levels that their own children, the "third generation," can't
match. Among the U.S.-born children of U.S.-born Hispanics -- the children
of the "third generation" and beyond -- just 36 percent of 18- to
24-year-old high-school graduates are in college. The second generation of
Hispanics catches up with the white population in terms of college attendance,
but its descendants lose some of that ground.
Moving Into New
States
About half of the nation's Hispanics live in just two states,
California and Texas. Eight other states -- Arizona, Colorado, Florida,
Illinois, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, and New York -- account for more
than a fourth.
But Hispanics also are rapidly moving into states where
relatively few had lived just a few decades ago. During the 1990s, their numbers
more than doubled in Kentucky, Minnesota, and Nebraska, more than tripled in
Alabama, Tennessee, and South Carolina, and more than quadrupled in Arkansas,
Georgia, and North Carolina.
Many colleges in these states are just
beginning to find ways to serve Hispanic students.
Carl V. Patton,
president of Georgia State University, says his institution established a
Hispanic-student-services office last spring and is working to increase Hispanic
enrollment, now at about 3 percent, to 8 percent to reflect the size of
Georgia's Hispanic population.
"We have found that the way you get these
students is from word of mouth," he says. "A stream of students starts to come
from the good schools, and those students will tell other students."
In
Minnesota, Minneapolis Community and Technical College has joined with U.S.
Bancorps to set up a program that trains Hispanic bank employees, in response to
a threefold increase in that city's Hispanic population during the 1990s.
Phillip L. Davis, the two-year college's president, says the program is popular
because it trains students for existing jobs and is not just based on
"off-in-the-distance speculation about what the job market will look like." In
some states, like California, Florida, Illinois, and Texas, public colleges are
feeling top-down pressure to better serve Hispanic students as Hispanic
legislators grow in number and flex more muscle.
For public colleges in
those states, improving services for Hispanic students is becoming "a budget
issue," says Gilbert Cárdenas, director of the Inter-University Program for
Latino Research. "They realize that if they are going to get the support of the
elected officials, they have to be more sensitive to the broader needs of the
state."
The Bush administration has taken note of the educational
problems of Hispanic Americans. Since 2001 it has increased federal spending on
colleges classified as "Hispanic-serving" by about 36 percent, to $93-million.
It has also overseen a $39-million, or roughly 64-percent, increase in spending
on grants to colleges of education to prepare teachers to work with students who
do not speak English at home.
In October 2001, President Bush signed an
executive order establishing the President's Advisory Commission on Educational
Excellence for Hispanic Americans. In a report issued last March, the panel
warned: "Hispanics are not maximizing their income potential or developing
financial security. This leads to lost tax revenues, lower rates of consumer
spending, reduced per-capita savings, and increased social costs."
Among
its recommendations, the commission urged the federal government to conduct much
more research on the needs of Hispanic students; hold colleges accountable for
improving Hispanic graduation rates; and undertake a nationwide public-awareness
campaign aimed at helping Hispanic parents navigate the nation's education
system.
Upon the release of the commission's report, Secretary of
Education Roderick R. Paige said: "We're not letting any more Hispanic kids slip
through the cracks. It's a disgrace. And it's going to stop."
Ronald
Reagan, and every president since, worked with similar panels on Hispanic
education, with mixed results. Mr. Yzaguirre, of the National Council of La
Raza, resigned as the head of such a commission under President Bill Clinton
because, he says, in six years not a single federal agency had complied with an
executive order instructing them to provide the panel with an inventory of
programs for Hispanic students. The report from the newest commission says that
it, too, had trouble getting federal departments and agencies to provide basic
information about their services to Hispanic students.
Such developments
have made many Hispanic advocates cynical about the prospect of the federal
government's bringing about real improvements any time soon.
"We don't
need any more reports," says Lauro F. Cavazos, who worked with such panels as
secretary of education under Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush.
"We
know what the problem is," Mr. Cavazos says. "We know what the solutions are.
There just has to be a will to do it, to bring about the change."
FOR MANY HISPANICS, COLLEGE IS AN OBSTACLE
COURSE
Hispanic high-school graduates are more likely to
go on to college than their white peers, yet are less likely to earn bachelor's
degrees. They are deterred by several obstacles tied to poverty and immigration,
and others that they inadvertently create for themselves by focusing as hard on
paying bills as they do on getting through college. Among the biggest
obstacles:
- Poor academic preparation. On average, Hispanic students score 9 percent
to 11 percent lower than white students on standardized college-admissions
tests. More than one-fourth of Hispanics enter college needing remedial
English courses, compared with one-tenth of white freshmen, and more than half
need remedial mathematics, compared with less than one-third of their white
peers. On average, Hispanic students' college grades are lower, and those who
need to play catch-up generally end up taking longer to earn a degree.
- Parents who never attended college. More than two out of five Hispanic
freshmen at four-year colleges are the first in their family to attend
college, compared with about one out of five white freshmen. Those whose
parents can't speak English are even less likely to get sound advice from
their families about college.
- Worries about tuition. More than three-fourths of Hispanic freshmen at
four-year colleges report having major concerns about paying for their
education, compared with one-fifth of white freshmen. Hispanic students tend
not to take advantage of all the financial aid that is available to them,
particularly loans, which usually account for most of the available
assistance.
- Not transferring from two-year colleges. About 40 percent of 18- to
24-year-old Hispanic college students are enrolled in two-year institutions,
compared with 25 percent of black and 25 percent of white students. Of those
who do not start at four-year institutions, 39 percent have no degree and have
dropped out within four years. Of those who begin at four-year institutions,
just 18 percent leave college without a degree within four years.
- Enrolling in college part time. About 25 percent of traditional-age
Hispanic college students are enrolled part time, compared with 15 percent of
white students. Part-time college students of any race or ethnicity are more
likely than full-timers to drop out.
- Enrolling later in life. Among the traditional college-age population, 33
percent of Hispanic high-school graduates and 42 percent of white high-school
graduates are enrolled in undergraduate programs. Traditional-age college
students are more likely than older students to earn their baccalaureates and
go on to earn advanced degrees. About 4 percent of Hispanic high-school
graduates 25 and older are enrolled in undergraduate programs, making them
twice as likely as their white counterparts to still be working toward
undergraduate degrees at that age when they are more likely to have children
and other responsibilities distracting them from their studies.
SOURCES: U.S Census Bureau; U.S.
Department of Education; Higher Education Research Institute at the University
of California at Los Angeles; Inter-University Program for Latino Research; Pew
Hispanic Center http://chronicle.com Section: Special
Report Volume 50, Issue 14, Page A8
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