“I don’t like saying it, but they all looked so white,” said Quintero, whose parents came to the United States from Mexico. “I just didn’t feel a sense of belonging.”
Then she went to a reception for admitted students at Dominican University, near where she grew up in the west Chicago suburbs. Among the things that made her decide almost immediately to go there: Information was provided to families in both English and Spanish.
“My parents finally got to ask questions” in their native language, said Quintero, now a junior on the track to law school. “I was used to translating for them my whole life. I literally cried.”
This seemingly small accommodation is one of many that have helped push up Dominican’s enrollment by nearly 25 percent since 2021, a period during which comparable institutions have struggled to attract students and as the number of 18-year-olds is about to begin a long decline.
That’s because the university has tapped into one group of prospective customers that’s growing: Hispanic high school graduates such as Quintero.
Universities and colleges have historically not done well at enrolling Hispanic students. Now their own success may largely depend on it.
“The demographics in our country are changing, and higher education has to adapt,” said Glena Temple, Dominican’s president.
Or, as Quintero put it, smiling: “Now they need us.”
Nearly 1 in3students in kindergarten through 12th grade is Hispanic, the National Center for Education Statistics reports. That’s up from fewer than 1 in 4 a decade ago. The proportion of students in public schools who are Hispanic is even higher in some states, including California (56 percent), Texas (53 percent) and Florida (38 percent).
That makes these young people — often the children or grandchildren of immigrants, or immigrants themselves — newly important to colleges and universities, which have historically not managed to attract as many Hispanic students as they have students from other racial backgrounds.
Yet at a time when higher education needs it to increase, the proportion of Hispanic students who go to college has been falling. Reversing that trend is challenging, for many reasons — the high cost, the need to find a job immediately after high school, the fact that many come from families with no college experience to draw on for advice — compounded by the increasingly aggressive attacks on campus diversity programs, which could make it even harder to recruit and support these students.
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In the past, said Deborah Santiago, chief executive officer of the Hispanic advocacy organization Excelencia in Education, higher education institutions “could hit their [enrollment] numbers without engaging this population. That’s no longer the case.”
This is true even in places people might not expect. The biggest school district in metropolitan Kansas City is 58 percent Hispanic, for example.
Those large numbers of Hispanic students approaching college age “is what we need to be preparing for as higher education institutions, and to meet the needs of our communities,” said Greg Mosier, president of Kansas City Kansas Community College, which now advertises in Spanish-language newspapers and on Spanish-language radio.
Responding to these changing demographics is about more than colleges filling seats. It will have an impact on the national economy.
About 43 percent of all jobs will require at least bachelor’s degrees by 2031, the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce estimates; a decline in the number of college graduates portends a “massive labor shortage” in industries that need them, according to the labor market analytics firm Lightcast.
That, in turn, means fewer highly salaried workers to pay into Social Security and other benefits programs, even as the number of recipients increases.
“As baby boomers retire, you’ve got a much smaller younger population that has to support a growing older population,” said Michael Collins, vice president of the Center for Racial Economic Equity at the nonprofit Jobs for the Future.
Unless colleges cast wider nets, said Collins — including by helping get more Hispanic Americans on a path to higher-paying jobs — “our quality of life will be lower. It’s a pretty dire picture.”
Florida in February ended a policy of charging lower in-state tuition at public colleges and universities to undocumented students, for instance. Other states have imposed or are considering similar measures. The Trump administration has jettisoned a Biden-era program to support Hispanic-serving institutions. And the Department of Education, in a letter to colleges, interpreted the 2023 Supreme Court ruling banning racial preferences in admission as prohibiting “race-based decision-making, no matter the form.”
While the legal basis for that edict has been widely challenged, it has higher education institutions on edge. Even many colleges and universities that advocates praised for boosting Hispanic enrollment didn’t want to discuss it.
Some experts say most programs to recruit and support Hispanic students wouldn’t be affected by the anti-DEI campaigns, since they’re offered to anyone who needs them. “These things work for all students,” said Anne-Marie Núñez, executive director of the Institute for Hispanic Student Success at the University of Texas at El Paso.
The proportion of Hispanic high school graduates heading directly to college is lower than the proportion of their white classmates who go, and falling — down from 70 percent to 58 percent from 2012 to 2022. That’s the last period for which the figures are available from the National Center for Education Statistics. Hispanic students who do enroll in college also drop out at higher rates.
There are financial and cultural reasons for this.
Median annual household income for Hispanic families is more than 25 percent lower than for white families, the Census Bureau says, meaning that college may seem out of reach. More than three-quarters of Hispanic students who go even to lower-cost community colleges have unmet financial need, the Center for Law and Social Policy has estimated.
This pushes many straight into the workforce. Many Hispanic college students work at least part time while they learn, something research finds reduces the likelihood of graduating.
“There’s a family structure that says that when a student is coming out of high school, they need to start providing for the family,” said Steve Kerge, vice president at the enrollment marketing, strategy and technology firm Spark451. “You need to show the ultimate goal of social mobility to the parents” by explaining the financial payoffs of degrees.
This can be harder than it sounds, considering that 73 percent of Hispanic students are the first in their families to go to college, according to NASPA, an association of student affairs administrators — more than undergraduates of any other race. And many go to public high schools with few college counselors.
When Eddie Rivera graduated from high school in North Carolina, “college wasn’t really an option. My counselor wasn’t there for me. I just followed what my Hispanic culture tells us, which is to go to work.”
Rivera, who has DACA status, or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, worked at a retirement home, an indoor trampoline park and a hospital during the pandemic, where colleagues encouraged him to go to college. With help from a scholarship program for undocumented students, he also ended up at Dominican, where at 28 he’s a junior majoring in international relations and diplomacy with plans to get a master’s degree in foreign policy and national security.
Today, banners with photos of successful Hispanic alumni hang from lampposts on the 30-acre campus, and a mariachi band leads celebrations on Día de los Muertos.
Tours are held in English and Spanish, students are offered on-campus jobs, and staffers help entire families through health care, housing and financial crises. Dominican added a satellite campus in the fall in Chicago’s largely Mexican American Pilsen neighborhood, providing job-oriented two-year associate degrees. Every student at the university gets financial aid, federal data shows.
“On a daily basis I run into a staff member or professor asking me what’s going on with my life and how they can support me,” said Aldo Cervantes, a junior business major with a minor in accounting who wants to go into banking or human resources.
There’s a Family Academy for students’ parents, grandparents, siblings and cousins to learn about university resources; as an incentive, families that come to five sessions get credit for their student to take a summer course at no cost.
“When we take a look at the Latine population going to college, it’s not about an individual choice,” said Gabe Lara, vice president of student success and engagement, using the university’s preferred term for people of Latin American descent. “It’s a family choice.”
These and other measures have helped to more than double the proportion of Hispanic students here over the last 10 years, to nearly 70 percent of the 2,570 undergraduates, according to figures provided by the university.
It can be a tough process, said Temple, the president.
Other higher education institutions will have to do the same things, said Kerge, at Spark451. “I would say they’re at the start of identifying this,” he said. “I think institutions in the next 24 months or 36 months will start to make moves.”
Universities and colleges that are serious about enrolling more Hispanic students can find them if they want to, said Sylvia Hurtado, a professor of education at UCLA. “You don’t have to look very far.” But “you need [to provide] support at each stage. We call it being more culturally responsive, more aware of who you’re recruiting and what their needs might be.”
Universities are beginning to do this, if slowly. UCLA itself didn’t launch a Spanish-language version of its admissions website until 2023, Hurtado pointed out — “and here we are in California.”
Even the smallest efforts to enroll and support Hispanic students are being further complicated by the withdrawal of diversity programs and financial help for undocumented students, many of them Hispanic.
Florida in February ended a policy of charging lower in-state tuition at public colleges and universities to undocumented students, for instance. Other states have imposed or are considering similar measures. The Trump administration has jettisoned a Biden-era program to support Hispanic-serving institutions. And the Department of Education, in a letter to colleges, interpreted the 2023 Supreme Court ruling banning racial preferences in admission as prohibiting “race-based decision-making, no matter the form.”
While the legal basis for that edict has been widely challenged, it has higher education institutions on edge. Even many colleges and universities that advocates praised for boosting Hispanic enrollment didn’t want to discuss it.
But without more of the growing Hispanic population enrolling in colleges, those institutions and the workforce face much bigger challenges, Núñez and others said.
“Having students succeed is in everybody’s interest,” she said. “The country will get left behind if it doesn’t have all hands on deck, including those who education has not served in the past.”
Back at Dominican, Genaro Balcazar leads enrollment and marketing strategies as chief operating officer. He, too, has a pragmatic way of looking at it.
“We address the needs of the students not because of who they are,” said Balcazar, “but because they need the help.”
This story was first published in the Hechinger Report. Read the original here.
