After listening to a recruiting pitch from the president of South Texas College, Juan Carlos Martinez Jr. is sold.
Many Hispanic boys who grow up amid the ramshackle colonias and parched citrus groves along the border with Mexico will drop out before graduating from high school, but Juan Carlos wants to go to college. While his understanding of the benefits of higher education may be a bit fuzzy, he’ll have plenty of time to make the case to his parents. After all, he’s only 7.
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Wearing a gray “Future Student” T-shirt and swinging his legs in a child-size chair in the library of Evangelina Garza Elementary School here, the second grader reflects on the message delivered by a parade of college officials during an assembly in August.
“It’s important to go to college, because you can have more things,” he says in a barely audible voice.
Asked what he would buy with his extra earnings, he pauses several seconds to think and flashes a shy grin. “Some books to read, and more toys.”
In Texas and across the nation, Hispanic students represent the fastest-growing segment of college enrollments. But Hispanics—boys in particular—remain underrepresented in proportion to their growing populations, and are the least likely of any major ethnic group to complete college or earn a degree, according to the Pew Hispanic Center. So institutions like South Texas, a public community college, are pairing up with local school officials to reach out to students as early as kindergarten to get them thinking about college. They’re also enlisting the support of parents, many of whom are poor and lack even a high-school diploma.
In Mission, where the elementary school is located, trailer homes and plywood shacks line the dirt roads. Most of the houses lack running water and electricity. Many of the district’s students live in these colonias, as makeshift neighborhoods near the border are known. Migrant farmworkers pass through the region during the fall and winter to harvest citrus crops, uprooting their children from the local schools and moving on when the season is over.
“One of the challenges we have is creating a college-going culture,” says South Texas’ first and only president, Shirley A. Reed. She has presided over the 30,000-student college, whose enrollment has nearly doubled over the past six years, since 1993, when it was founded. Hispanics make up 93 percent of the enrollment. Some 75 percent of its students are the first in their families to attend college, and 82 percent receive some kind of financial aid.
With five campuses in two counties, South Texas College is located in one of the poorest regions of the country. Evangelina Garza is one of seven elementary schools that the college has adopted in its quest to link up with at least one school in each of the 18 school districts along the border region served by the college.
One recent morning, during a pep rally at the school, Ms. Reed gives a rousing pep talk to a cafeteria full of students, who ask her how many years it takes to become a scientist, lawyer, soccer player, or animal-control officer. After a ceremony in which a “College Bound” flag is raised in front of the school, she joins the college’s academic deans and other top administrators on a school tour.
“We’re planting a seed early on to ensure that one day these kids will go to college,” says the school’s principal, José T. Garcia.
In each of the adopted schools, reminders about the importance of college are everywhere. Mr. Garcia encourages teachers—even in kindergarten—to display their framed college diplomas in their classrooms. At least once a month, teachers wear T-shirts from their alma maters. Students, chattering in Spanish and English, jostle in hallways transformed by paint and murals into Longhorn Lane and AggieLand corridor. The South Texas College jaguar roars from the walls of the school gymnasium, alongside the logos of a half-dozen other colleges.
Those messages seem to have made an impression on Christian Ortiz, a 10-year-old fifth grader with the earnest demeanor of a budding politician. He has a ready answer when asked why he sees college in his future. “I want to live a happy life and not have any problems—but mostly to be a doctor,” he says.
He has heard, though, that college is expensive, and he worries that his mother and father might not be able to afford it. “Right now they’re house parents,” he says, using a common euphemism for unemployed.
William Serrata, vice president for student affairs and enrollment management at South Texas, reassures children as they mill around in the gymnasium that the college will work with them when they’re older to find scholarships and financial aid. “We tell them that their job is to get to college, and we’ll find a way to help them pay for it later.”
A college education is presented as an imperative rather than an option. “The message is: You will go to college,” Mr. Serrata says.
That message is aimed especially at boys. Across Texas, only 3.7 percent of Hispanic males were enrolled in college in the fall of 2010. That’s the lowest participation rate of any major racial and gender group, according to the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board.
Nationally, aggressive outreach efforts by colleges and population growth among Hispanics are starting to make a difference, according to a study of census figures released last month by the Pew Hispanic Center. The number of all 18- to 24-year-olds in college reached a high of 12.2 million in October 2010, driven by a 24-percent surge for Hispanics from 2009 to 2010, the analysis found. Hispanics made up 15 percent of overall enrollment in that age group.
“I suspect that some of this increase reflects the fact that many of these high-school graduates can’t find work because of the depressed labor market, so they’re enrolling in college instead,” says Richard Fry, lead author of the Pew report and a senior researcher at the center.
Victor B. Sáenz, an assistant professor of educational administration at the University of Texas at Austin, suspects that the spike could also be due in part to for-profit colleges’ recruiting of minority students in recent years, and he worries that many students may be assuming more debt than they can realistically pay off. “The increase is great,” he says, “but let’s make sure that it’s a quality education that will lead to a viable career path, and that students are getting access to the full complement of advising and career help they need.”
And while the number of Hispanic students attending college has risen steadily in recent years, Hispanic high-school graduates still trailed both black and white counterparts in college-enrollment rates in 2009 (the most recent year for which figures are available from the U.S. Department of Education). Among 16- to 24-year-olds who had completed high school, 59.3 percent of Hispanic students were in college, compared with 69.5 percent of black students and 71.3 percent of white students.
And while more Hispanics are enrolling in college, completion rates remain low, especially at community colleges, where most Hispanic students start out. The percentage of students graduating from South Texas College within three years, while up from last year, is still only 17.3 percent. And even though that rate is higher than the state and national averages for community colleges, it’s a cause for concern.
During an orientation session at South Texas in August, two national experts in the field of Hispanic recruitment and retention, including Mr. Sáenz, spoke to incoming students and their parents. All new students are required to attend, and to bring at least one family member.
Mr. Sáenz went around the room, asking parents about their children’s career goals. “They have to be able to articulate it, and to say out loud—'I want to be a veterinarian, or a nurse, or an FBI agent'—and to embrace it and be proud of it,” he told the parents, mentioning a few of the professions they had identified.
“Your role as parents is to continue to make this connection to them over and over—to remind them that you can’t get to those careers without studying.”
Mr. Sáenz, who directs an advocacy-and-research program at the University of Texas called Project Males, cites federal education statistics showing that while Hispanics represent 16 percent of the U.S. population, they earn only 8 percent of undergraduate degrees.
Luis Ponjuan, an assistant professor of educational administration at the University of Florida who is a co-director of Project Males, told parents at the South Texas orientation that their children will face pressure from friends who insist that college is a waste of time. Those who are working will also struggle to balance their jobs and studies, he warns. He urges the parents to get to know faculty members and administrators at the college, and to keep talking with their children about the pressures they will face.
Among the contributing factors that the University of Texas project has found for the high dropout rates among Latino males is a sense of machismo that often discourages them from seeking help. “Latino boys tend to pride themselves in being strong and independent,” Mr. Sáenz says. “We’ve found that the best way to engage them is by reaching out early and often and not being patronizing or demeaning.”
Boys represent 53 percent of students at the elementary school in Mission, but only 42 percent of those at South Texas College. Veronica Fernandes, a parent volunteer at the school who earned a technical degree in her native Mexico, says through a translator that she has already started promoting the idea of college to her 8- and-9-year-old sons.
“When we drive by construction sites or pass gardeners mowing lawns, I tell them those are good and honest jobs,” she says, “but that if they go to college, they won’t have to work outside in the heat, and they can have a better future.”
