Hispanic College Students Key To Obama Education Goal Success

By Griselda Nevárez, Voxxi

Hispanic college students underscore an audacious goal that President Obama set in 2009: he wanted the United States to become the top-ranked country in the world, with the highest proportion of college graduates by 2020. To get there, 60 percent of all 25-to 34-year-olds must obtain a college degree.

Though all ethnic groups must graduate more college students to reach Obama’s goal, education experts say increasing college degree attainment among Latinos, who are lagging further behind in college completion, will be critical.

In 2011, only 21 percent of Latinos had at least an associate degree compared to 57 percent of Asians, 44 percent of whites and 30 percent of blacks.

Tina Gridiron Smith, program officer for the Lumina Foundation for Education, said these numbers show teachers, college professors, education advocates and policymakers “have quite a bit of work to do.”

“We will not see the national outcomes that we hope for our future if we do not embrace and see a positive increase in the number of Latinos that are crossing the finish line with two-year or four-year degrees,” Smith said. “We can’t get there without targeted efforts to support Latino student success.”

Last November, the Lumina Foundation awarded a total of $7.2 million over a four-year period to 12 partnerships in 10 states with fast-growing Latino student populations. The initiative focuses on bridging together groups that promise to improve college enrollment and completion among Latinos.

In December 2010, the Indianapolis-based foundation also awarded Excelencia in Education, a $400,000 grant to help further an initiative that tracks Latino degree attainment in each state and provides methods to accelerate it.

The initiative, dubbed “Ensuring America’s Future by Increasing Latino College Completion,” estimates that Latinos will need to earn 5.5 million degrees by 2020 to meet Obama’s goal.

In its first year of tracking, Latinos earned at least 360,000 college degrees, well over the 220,000 they projected was needed, Excelencia in Education reported April 10.

Deborah Santiago, vice president of policy and research at Excelencia in Education, said that while this signals that Latinos are on the right path, “we can’t say for sure that this college completion rate is going to continue to 2020.”

“What we can say is that we do believe there is the capacity for Latinos to help meet Obama’s goal, we just need to make sure we’re paying attention to policies that help ensure college access to this population,” she said.

For years, studies have shown that Latinos understand the value of higher education. Yet most don’t make it to college mostly due to not being college-ready, not being able to afford it and lacking college-knowledge, especially among first-generation students.

But the Pew Hispanic Center reveals that might be starting to change. Last summer, it reported that between 2009 and 2010, college enrollment among 18-to 25-year-old Latinos surged by 24 percent.

Santiago said though this is a sign of progress, there’s still much more to be done. She pointed out that only 35.6 percent of Latinos who are first-time, full-time students complete either an associate degree within three years or a bachelor’s degree within six years, compared to 49.4 percent of white, non-Hispanic, students.

“The enrollment increase is great, but if we don’t graduate them two or four years later, then there’s just an enrollment hike and there’s no completion,” she said. “We need to make sure that increase in enrollment translates to completion.”

Roberto Rodríguez, who serves as a special assistant to Obama for education, said that as the Latino population continues to rapidly grow, “increasing their academic achievement will be critical to meet the country’s workforce demand.”

By 2020, the Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts the number of Hispanic workers will grow by 7.7 million, and Latinos will make up 18.6 percent of the nation’s labor force. During this time, one-third of new jobs openings will require a bachelor’s degree or better and another 30 percent will require at least some post-secondary education, according to a June 2010 study by the Center on Education and the Workforce at Georgetown University.

Alisa Cunningham, vice president of research and programs at the Institute for Higher Education Policy, said these numbers show “we need more highly educated people because high school is not enough anymore.”

This article first apeared in Voxxi.

Griselda Nevárez is a reporter with Hispanic Link News Service in Washington D.C.