It seems like every college is working to recruit more Hispanic students. And with good reason: Colleges are all looking at the same demographic projections. Conventional wisdom says they ignore this growing population at their peril.
But one organization is trying to greatly increase the number of Hispanic students at an unexpected kind of institution: conservative Christian colleges.
A small number, including Liberty, Oral Roberts, and Regent Universities, are working with the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, a group that represents more than 25,000 Hispanic evangelical churches, to get more students in the door. The colleges also hope to raise educational attainment more broadly among Hispanic Christians.
“When most people think of American evangelicals, they have a stereotyped image that was probably entirely appropriate in 1985, but not for 2010,” says D. Michael Lindsay, an assistant professor of sociology at Rice University and author of the book Faith in the Halls of Power: How Evangelicals Joined the American Elite. Today, he says, there is a “growing awareness within evangelical circles that they have to expand beyond white suburbia.”
And there are more Hispanic Americans who might be a good fit for these colleges than people realize. Many people think of Hispanics as being monolithically Roman Catholic. A 2003 report from the Institute for Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame found that about 70 percent of them are Catholic—and that of those, more than one in four have had a “born again” experience.
Twenty-three percent of Hispanic Americans, more than eight million people, identify themselves as Christian, but not Catholic. Of those, most are Protestant, and in that group, 88 percent consider themselves evangelical or “born again” and 64 percent Pentecostal, charismatic, or “spirit filled.” In short, the report says: “To put these findings in national perspective, there are now more Latino Protestants in the United States than Jews or Muslims or Episcopalians and Presbyterians combined.”
Students with that religious identity could be right at home at Oral Roberts or Regent, which are two of the largest charismatic colleges in the country, says Gaston Espinosa, an associate professor of religious studies at Claremont McKenna College and one of the authors of the report. At first, he says, Liberty seemed a less-obvious choice, but there are about one million Hispanics who are Baptist.
What the growing Hispanic Protestant population is looking for, Mr. Espinosa says, is a college “who really cares about us, beyond enrollment and affirmative-action laws.”
A Focus on Education
The Rev. Jesse Miranda, a leader in the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, knows that feeling firsthand.
On his first day of first grade, Mr. Miranda was excited to have his name called. But the public-school teacher, a nun, never did call him. Later, he came up to her desk and pointed out his name on the roll: “Jesus Miranda.” The teacher said she would not call him the Lord’s name and announced to the class that the name of the boy in front of them was “Jesse.”
That night, eating dinner with his family, he described what had happened. His father laughed, Mr. Miranda says, and told him names are just labels. He still goes by Jesse.
That story, which Mr. Miranda told church and college leaders at a recent meeting on Regent’s campus here, may well contain the genesis of his conviction that it’s not enough to promote diversity in a brochure. Mr. Miranda was one of the early voices raising awareness about educational attainment within the Hispanic church, and a new generation of leaders is pushing the issue forward.
The conference made education a main focus in 2008 after its leaders became alarmed at the low high-school-graduation rate of Hispanics, which undercuts the job opportunities and leadership potential of many congregants. It formed its first partnership more than a year ago with Oral Roberts University, and has since added Indiana Wesleyan, Liberty, and Regent Universities, as well as Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. It plans to add more institutions to that list, and has created a subsidiary to work with its partner colleges, the Alliance for Hispanic Christian Education. The plan is to spin the alliance off as an independent group down the road.
The conference is particularly worried about the high-school dropout rate of Hispanic students—which was more than 18 percent in 2008, compared with 8 percent over all. The church, which is an important part of life for many Hispanic families, needs to help drive educational attainment, says the Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, the conference’s president.
Conference leaders have laid out goals for the group’s churches and the partner colleges. The organization has deemed the first Sunday in September “National Hispanic Education Sunday” and is asking its church leaders to preach on the importance of education that day. It is also asking the churches to “adopt” a local high school in order to help improve its graduation rate. And it is challenging them to join a campaign, “Generation Fuerza,” in which a church commits to seeing every one of its children finish high school and go on to some form of postsecondary education.
As for the colleges, the group is asking them each to offer three full scholarships for qualified Hispanic students starting in 2011. And, more significantly, its goals say that “by 2015, Christian colleges and universities will work arduously to increase Hispanic enrollment to a minimum of 25 percent of total enrollment.” That’s not an arbitrary number: If at least 25 percent of a college’s full-time-equivalent undergraduates are Hispanic, and it meets some other criteria, it can be recognized by the federal government as a Hispanic Serving Institution, a designation that makes it eligible for special grants. The conference is pushing its partner colleges to pursue that designation.
Right now those goals are informal, but the organization is asking its partners to pledge, by the end of this academic year, to pursue them. Mr. Rodriguez expects to have a dozen partner colleges by that time.
Then, it’s a matter of meeting those goals. The question, says Mr. Lindsay, of Rice, is: “Do they have the resources, the networks to transform those grand ideas into measurable outcomes?”
Welcoming Hispanic Students
Colleges have a number of very practical reasons to go after Hispanic students: higher enrollments, more diversity, the possibility of additional federal money. All those are things Oral Roberts University wants. But, more than that, the president says, “I’m a big believer you do well by doing good.”
The university feels an affinity for the Hispanic community, says Mark Rutland, its president. In general terms, Hispanic Americans are family-oriented, conservative, and involved in church life, qualities that fit well with the university’s ethos. Still, Oral Roberts’s Hispanic student population is small, about 6 percent. Last spring it opened a new Hispanic Center on campus to, among other things, welcome Hispanic students and their families. “We are making a very intentional move toward recruiting and supporting and trying to help Hispanic students not just get here, but graduate,” says Mr. Rutland.
Oral Roberts has also introduced Spanish singing in its chapel services and has started a group that sings in Spanish. Mr. Rutland tries to throw in words from his own conversational Spanish when he speaks. The university is well placed not just to help Hispanic students, but to help other Christian colleges reach out to them, he says. “There are not enough universities, and certainly not enough Christian universities, being intentional.”
Liberty University is perhaps being the most intentional about stopping the leaks in the Hispanic-student pipeline. The conference’s partnership with Liberty focuses on its online offerings. Several years ago, Liberty created an accredited online grade-school program that is used by about half a dozen churches and private schools, as well as by home-schooling families. This year Liberty joined with Iglesia Cristiana Misericordia, a Hispanic megachurch in Laredo, Tex., to offer its programs at the church’s school, New Harvest Academy. Liberty’s online program starts in third grade, but the school teaches younger children, too.
The church chose Liberty as its partner in the project because “they are very sensitive to the needs of our community,” says Dr. Gilberto Velez, the church’s senior pastor.
New Harvest Academy can help students make the transition to college: High-school juniors and seniors can take introductory courses Liberty has identified as being most likely to be accepted by any college. And should the student eventually go on to Liberty’s own residential program, the university will discount tuition by the amount the student’s family spent on its charges for those introductory courses.
Jay Spencer, dean of online nondegree programs at Liberty, has a bold goal for the school program: “I’d like to see one at all 30,000 churches.”
Liberty is also offering online certificate and degree programs to pastors and lay people whose congregations are part of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference. Many pastors of these churches have day jobs in addition to ministry, and not all of them have formal biblical education. (See related article, Page B20.)
Reflecting the World
Regent University, too, is focusing on future church leaders. In particular, the School of Divinity is making a big push to be more diverse. The university has been chosen as the conference’s graduate-school partner. Like Oral Roberts, Regent is building from a small base of Hispanic students. About 6 percent of the university’s undergraduates and 3 or 4 percent of its graduate students are Hispanic, as are a handful of faculty. But the university has one big advantage as it works to expand that population: Its new president, Carlos Campo, is Hispanic.
Victor H. Cuartas has been at Regent since starting his graduate work there in 1999. He is now an instructor in practical ministry and global missions at the university’s divinity school, where he is the only Hispanic faculty member. Mr. Cuartas successfully pushed for the university to add a bilingual staff person to its enrollment office. Increasingly, the school is bringing in African-American students, and it is starting to get more Hispanic students, too.
“We have really strived in the last four to six years to make the School of Divinity more inclusive,” says Michael D. Palmer, who has led it since 2006. Thirty-nine percent of its students were African-American as of 2008-9, and 42 percent were women. It isn’t easy to get people past the notion that the school is full of old white men, Mr. Palmer says, but the effort is important: “You can’t talk about making a difference in the world unless you reflect what the world is like, demographically.”
For the divinity school in particular, having a diverse student body is important because different ethnic groups tend to be concentrated in different kinds of churches, which can bring a broader range of theological and political viewpoints to the classroom, he says.
Still, Mr. Palmer says, reaching the Hispanic community is in some ways more difficult than reaching the African-American community. By and large, there are fewer big Hispanic churches in the Virginia Beach area. And many Hispanic pastors have a second job, so it’s difficult for them to carve out time to come to campus events.
But that doesn’t mean the school isn’t trying. This fall it started a yearlong noncredit program for lay people, called the Church Education Initiative, to provide churchgoers who may not have a college degree with theological education. The school plans to use the program, which is significantly cheaper than its graduate programs, in its outreach to Hispanic churches.
“We want them to see us as a resource to do what they want to accomplish,” Mr. Palmer says.
Regent is already a gathering place for local Hispanic clergy, Mr. Cuartas says. The university, he says, is trying as many different avenues as it can to raise Hispanic attainment.
People think of Regent as being white, Mr. Cuartas says, but, starting with the new president, “the color of the university is changing.”
