As colleges lose enrollment, some turn to one market that's growing: Hispanic students
RIVER FOREST, Ill. - When she began to check out colleges as a high school student, Jacqueline Quintero noticed something many seemed to have in common.
'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.'
While the ranks of white, Black and Asian high school graduates are expected to fall by 2041 by 26 percent, 22 percent and 10 percent, respectively, the number of Hispanic graduates from high schools is projected to rise during that time by 16 percent, according to the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education, which tracks this.
Nearly 1 in 3 students 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.
Related: Interested in innovations in higher education? Subscribe to our free biweeklyhigher education newsletter.
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.'
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.
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.
Related: The number of 18-year-olds is about to drop sharply, packing a wallop for colleges - and the economy
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.
A small Catholic university that dates back to 1922 and was previously called Rosary College, Dominican has a history of educating the children of immigrants - northern and central European, at the start.
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.
Related: A case study of what's ahead with Trump DEI crackdowns
'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.
As other universities start trying to recruit Hispanic students, 'they ask us all the time how we were able to achieve this,' she said. 'What they don't like to hear is, it's all of these things. You have to be committed to it. It has to be about more than filling seats.'
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.'
Related: 'Easy to just write us off': Rural students' choices shrink as colleges slash majors
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.
Experts say most programs to recruit and support Hispanic students probably 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.
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.'
Contact writer Jon Marcus at 212-678-7556 or jmarcus@hechingerreport.org.
This story about Hispanic college-going was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our higher education newsletter. Listen to our higher education podcast.
The post As colleges lose enrollment, some turn to one market that's growing: Hispanic students appeared first on The Hechinger Report.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
42 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Scholarship celebration honors Black college-bound seniors
BLOOMINGTON, Ill. (WMBD) — Hundreds gathered at a Bloomington church on Saturday to celebrate Black excellence in the classroom. The ceremony was held at 2 p.m. Saturday, June 7, at Mount Pisgah Baptist Church. It was sponsored by the Mentoring and Providing Scholarships Program, a local non-profit that mentors black students to learn etiquette, financial literacy and public speaking skills. More than $80,000 in scholarships were awarded to Black college-bound seniors for their academic achievements and community service. 'The annual Joint Scholarship Celebration plays an integral role in celebrating the successes of African American students,' Carla Campbell-Jackson, co-founder of MAPS, said. 'The MAPS Program is invaluable for students, and for our community, as we are developing 'real time' leaders and thought partners, who will continue to make a difference locally, and beyond.' Money for the scholarships was gathered with the help of African-American sororities, fraternities, and community-based organizations. MAPS looks to help students prepare for the professional world with important skills such as public speaking, said Shaun Harden, one of the students who received several scholarships. 'MAPS has been really great, especially for professional development. For instance, one of our previous sessions was about public speaking,' Harden said. 'We talked about how we were able to approach the stand and how we were able to address the audience properly, how to avoid filler words, a lot of different proper speaking things that you don't really get to learn other than through experience.' Local philanthropists also contributed to the scholarship fund, which helped raise more money for African American students looking to pursue higher education. Keynote speakers for the event included NAACP Image Award Winner and WMBD Summer Intern Bradley Ross Jackson and Teresa Haley, who shared some information and advice with the students. 'I learned that if you work hard, if you stay strong and determined, and continue to try to do your best and give back to the communities that have supported you, that you will eventually be rewarded in the end,' said Gabrielle Johnson, the president of the Bloomington-Normal NAACP Youth Council. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Yahoo
5 hours ago
- Yahoo
Quipu: The Inca's Mysterious Recording Device
Long before Spanish colonization, the indigenous people of Peru kept track of important dates and numbers, and perhaps even stories, using a mysterious coding system of strings and knots called a quipu. When the Spanish invaded, they decided these bundles of strings and knots were idolatrous and pagan, in opposition to the Catholic Church. They burned them, hoping to quell any thought of resistance. Quipu means knot in Quechua, the dominant indigenous language in the region. You might mistake a quipu for a brightly colored necklace or headdress, but it is a communication device. Unlike their Mayan and Aztec counterparts, the Incas had no written language. They used quipu instead. Quipus consist of a series of colored, knotted cords made from cotton, wool, or other animal fibers. The knots and their placement on the cords represented numerical values. In some cases, it carried other information, such as dates or records of events. The use of the quipu dates back to 2500 BCE, long before the Inca Empire emerged. We still don't know how it originated. Deciphering quipus is tough. Its purpose and meaning can change depending on the length of the cord, the number of knots, the color, the way the cords are twisted and woven, the material, and the arrangement. While some historians think they were used almost exclusively to communicate numbers, others believe they were capable of storytelling and poetry. Certainly, the main purpose of the quipu was to track and manage the data of populations, goods, resources, and taxes. It was the administrative tool of the empire. Each knot on the cord had a specific value depending on its position, with different knot types (such as single knots, long knots, or figure-eight knots) representing different values. The Incas used the decimal system and knots to record 1s, 10s, 100s, 1000s, and so on. The colors of the cords could indicate categories like resources, people, or geographical locations. For example, red represented warriors or war, white represented silver, and yellow symbolized gold. The quipus were managed by quipucamayocs, which means "quipu authority." These administrators were the record keepers, accountants, bookkeepers, mathematicians, census takers, and historians of the empire. The smooth running of the empire rested almost entirely on their shoulders. The Incas had a complex road network called the Qhapaq Ñan. All these roads led to the capital of Cusco. Endurance runners called chasquis transported quipus along these roads, resting or passing them to other runners in supply stations called tambos posted every few kilometers. Messengers could quickly carry news of an Incan victory, the death of an emperor, or details of an enemy attack from province to province. After smallpox had killed the ruler Huayna Capac, his sons, Atahualpa and Huascar, battled for the throne. Atahualpa triumphed and killed his brother. To further legitimize his ascension, Atahualpa had all records destroyed. This meant burning quipus that recorded anything to do with his brother. Atahualpa even killed the quipucamayocs. "[It was] a total renewal, what the Incas called a pachakuti or a turning over of time and space," historian Mark Cartwright wrote. Later, a Spanish governor of Peru, Vaca de Castro, tried to find quipucamayocs to teach him about the land. Eventually, he came across two who had survived the purge. "They found them wandering in the mountains, terrorized by the tyrants of the past," according to historian John A. Yeakel. Though the Spanish destroyed many quipus, some chose to study them. Inca Garcilaso de la Vega was the son of a conquistador and an Incan prince, and acted as an intermediary between the two peoples. He learned about the quipu as part of his upbringing and wrote extensively about them: When my father's Indians came to town on Midsummer's Day to pay their tribute, they brought me the quipus; and the curacas [local leaders] asked my mother to take note of their stories, for they mistrusted the Spaniards, and feared that they would not understand them. I was able to reassure them by re-reading what I had noted down under their dictation. Likewise, a rogue Jesuit priest named Blas Valera advocated for learning from the quipus. Also half Spanish and half Inca, Valera proclaimed that the Incas were the real rulers of Peru. He died under house arrest in 1597. In 2015, anthropologist Sabine Hyland got a call from the remote Andean village of San Juan de Collata. This little village held some of the last remaining quipus. Villagers granted Hyland access to two quipus from the 18th century. They told her that for years, guarding the quipus was a coming-of-age ritual for local adolescent boys. After seeing one of Hyland's documentaries, the village elders had reached out, hoping she would visit. "Over the next couple days, we would learn that these multicolored quipus, each of which is just over two feet long, were narrative epistles created by local chiefs during a time of war in the 18th century," Hyland wrote. The elders recounted the story of a failed rebellion against the Spanish. A leader, betrayed by his associates, was imprisoned and eventually executed. He had used the quipu to tell his countrymen that he was the ruling Inca Emperor. Not far from the village of San Juan de Collata, Hyland was invited by a local schoolteacher to examine a hybrid quipu. The hybrid was set on a wooden board containing a ledger of names and multicolored quipu threads. "The board bears the names of villagers, while the quipu cord associated with each name indicates the contribution of labor and/or goods that the individual was expected to provide in a community ceremony," Hyland wrote. Much to Hyland's astonishment, quipus were used in the village until the 1940s for communal, administrative, and record-keeping purposes.
Yahoo
8 hours ago
- Yahoo
‘Keep Beaufort Beaufort' is a reminder and a rallying cry for us all
'Keep Beaufort Beaufort.' What beautiful marching orders from Cynthia Jenkins, who stepped down this month as the director of the Historic Beaufort Foundation after a-14 year tenure there. You'd think this is a group that looks back in time, sometimes to an aggravating degree, and it does. But since 1947, it has looked forward by doing its best to keep Beaufort Beaufort. I hope the foundation is the first one to capitalize on the 'Keep Beaufort Beaufort' T-shirts, if they haven't done so already. But really, that is the cry of our times all over the South Carolina Lowcountry — 'Save us, dear God, from ourselves.' And we're not the only ones in the fight. The most famous municipal rallying cry is probably 'Keep Austin Weird' in Texas, but it's easy to imagine a lot of T-shirt wishes closer to home. Keep Bluffton Eccentric. Keep St. Helena Gullah. Keep Hilton Head Over There. Keep Columbia Hot. Keep Myrtle Beach Kitschy. Keep Charleston From Sinking. A real one today is 'Keep Chelsea Rural,' a grassroots reaction to the kudzu vine of growth that is now reaching beyond Bluffton and Hardeeville to overtake Highway 462 in rural Jasper County. A similar new plea is 'Save the Euhaw.' As Hilton Head Island has grown from a few thousand residents to around 40,000 while luring 3.5 million visitors a year, some people even marched in the streets trying to 'save' things. We've had: Save Our Trees. Save the Sea Pines Deer. Save the Forest Beach Chickens. Save the Tiki Hut. Have all these people over all this time been asking too much? Cynthia Jenkins was in the best position to know what it means, and understand what it will take, to keep Beaufort Beaufort. All of these grassroots wishes implore us to know who we are. What is our soul? And why would we sell it to the devil? What is our birthright? And why would we sell it for a bowl of lentil stew? 'Keeping' and 'saving' our soul implores us to know who it is that is defining who or what we are. Is it the travel brochure or the poet? The Big Mac or the shrimp burger? Trader Joe's or Harold's Country Club? Beaufort can tell her own story, if we'll but have the sense to listen. It is older than the United States of America itself, and has somehow rolled with the tides and the times under six different flags. It serves today a feast of flavor brought by the Africans, Huguenots, Spanish, English, Scots, and, yes, plenty of damn Yankees. Best-selling author Pat Conroy, who was adopted by the people of Beaufort when he was just a sniveling Marine Corps dependent, came as close as anyone to capturing the allure of Beaufort in mere words. In 'The Prince of Tides,' Conroy wrote, 'To describe our growing up in the low country of South Carolina, I would have to take you to the marsh on a spring day, flush the great blue heron from its silent occupation, scatter marsh hens as we sink to our knees in mud, open you an oyster with a pocketknife and feed it to you from the shell and say, 'There. That taste. That's the taste of my childhood.'' Countless others have savored it over 400 years. We can thank Cynthia Jenkins for her years of attention to every detail of her unique home town. But we can also thank her for reminding us how important it is to 'Keep Beaufort Beaufort.' David Lauderdale may be reached at lauderdalecolumn@
