College Admissions “Arms Race” Affects Latino Students
I was recently invited to speak to a group of high school students to give them tips for writing their college application essays. Some of the students (there were about 15) had applied or were planing to apply to more than a dozen schools. They are, in essence, playing the odds. And they’re not the only ones.
Thank goodness my kids are already in college; it’s a jungle out there.
What’s happened is that there are more kids graduating from high school and they’re competing for a finite number of slots in the colleges and universities of their choice. The competition is tough for all kids. But what about Latino kids, first generation college students?
The rise in population that has generated the competition has also strained the budgets of community colleges across the country. Community colleges have become the gateway to higher education for students of color; the effect has seeped over.
The Washington Post’s Answer Sheet posted a good piece about it: “The rise in applications at community colleges, for-profit institutions and less-selective public institutions appears to be a result of the increasing sizes over the years of graduating high school classes, and there has been growth in the number of applicants who are Hispanic and black, students who are more likely from moderate- and low-income families with less rigorous academic preparation. Many of these institutions have been hard hit by the economic downturn, and research shows that many of these underfunded public schools lack resources to meet the needs of their growing student bodies.”
The issue was studied by the National Association for College Admission Counseling in an effort to put what they called the “College Admissions Arms Race” in context.
The study, though, does offer a distinction and a caveat “that changes at more selective institutions are likely due to increased applications per student, while changes at less selective institutions are more likely a function of growth in the number of high school graduates. Because open admission institutions are not required to report admission data to IPEDS, the authors’ ability to make conclusions about certain groups of institutions—community colleges, for-profit institutions and Hispanic-serving institutions (HSIs)—was limited. The data presented for these groups should be interpreted with caution, as they represent only those institutions with competitive admission.”
