Academe's Hispanic Future

The nation's largest minority group faces big obstacles in higher education, and colleges struggle to find the right ways to help

(By Peter Schmidt, Chronicle of Higher Education) November 28, 2004 - 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 Hispanic 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 Hispanic 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 Hispanic 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 Hispanics regardless of national origin or income, and among Hispanic 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 Hispanic 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.