The Latino lens.
One way to develop that is through outreach. “If you’re not even reaching out to where many of them live and work, you’re not going to get them,” Santiago said. Spanish-language radio is a must for such marketing, she noted. To establish student-recruiting pipelines, consider making connections with trusted organizations in the community, like churches. The advice resonated for me because it echoed a lot of what I heard in developing my report on the adult student and a follow-up guide on how to start recruiting and serving that demographic. I wasn’t thinking that much about ethnicity then. Historically, the adult-learning council hasn’t had that focus either. But Santiago said this project will help shift that: “We bring the Latino lens.”
She also reminded me of the power of perceptions — and misperceptions. Many college faculty members and administrators may still believe that the majority of Latino adults are immigrants or undocumented, Santiago said. “There is still a lot of ignorance about what the population is, or isn’t.”
The self-evaluation that the 15 colleges will undergo as part of the project, using the council’s Adult Learner 360 tool, could help highlight spots where institutions might need to educate their personnel. Santiago said she hopes it also helps colleges correct the misperceptions of prospective students, like the notion “that there isn’t financial aid for adults.” (In reality, it is sometimes harder for adults to qualify, but that doesn’t mean it’s not available.)
Most colleges have let their Hispanic focus remain on younger students. “Because of where we are economically,” Santiago said, the adult Hispanic demographic “doesn’t seem like the easiest and quickest population to get.” This project, she hopes, will change that dynamic.
Clearly there’s at least some interest. While the project was designed for just 15 institutions, nearly three times that many applied to be part of it.
A prize for Anant Agarwal and a $3.7-million gift to edX
Last week Anant Agarwal, the chief executive of the nonprofit MOOC venture edX, was awarded the Yidan Prize for Education Development for making education more accessible to people around the world. (A Northwestern University professor of statistics, Larry Hedges, won the prize for education research.)
When I interviewed Agarwal here at the Chronicle offices in 2017, he spoke passionately about education as a human right and his hopes that the edX platform would remain a tool for expanding educational access around the world, even as it began to shift its focus to more prosaic matters like developing a sustainable business model. At the time, he also predicted that the venture, created in 2012, could become self-sustaining within three years.
The Yidan Prize, created in 2016, carries a lucrative purse: the equivalent of $3.7 million this year. Officials at edX told me on Monday that Agarwal plans to commit the entire amount to edX “to help fuel ongoing innovation in digital education at scale.” What that means specifically, who knows. But I can only imagine it’s a welcome influx of cash as edX closes in on 2020.
Quote of the week:
“I would happily give that up. There are plenty of other things I’d rather be doing.”
— From an interview my colleague Nell Gluckman conducted with Maryland’s attorney general, Brian Frosh, on the attention he and fellow state attorneys general received for suing the U.S. Department of Education for what he called its “flat-out refusal” to enforce federal regulations designed to protect students from abusive practices by colleges. Last week a federal judge ruled that the department violated the law by delaying a regulation designed to protect student borrowers from having to repay their federal loans if they were defrauded by their colleges. The judge has yet to determine a remedy.
Got a tip you’d like to share or a question you’d like me to answer? Let me know at goldie@chronicle.com.