The demographic changes sweeping the nation—especially the growth in the population of native-born young Hispanics—will have a profound impact on community-college enrollments and leadership in the years to come, experts told the 1,800 attendees on Thursday here at the annual meeting of the Association of Community College Trustees.
The Hispanic and Asian populations are now growing faster than the U.S. population as a whole, and the number of Hispanic students arriving at colleges, particularly community colleges, is on the rise, Mark Hugo Lopez of the Pew Research Center told the trustees, presidents, and other attendees at the four-day meeting, which concludes on Saturday.
In the future, most of the growth in the nation’s labor force will be made up of Hispanic workers, Mr. Lopez said. The Pew center does not make policy recommendations, he noted, but the data he presented made clear that, for two-year colleges, the challenge and opportunities will come from finding ways to serve a Hispanic population that is more diverse geographically than in the past. That’s because several Southern states, including Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, South Carolina, and Tennessee, are seeing surges in their Hispanic populations.
Moreover, he said, Hispanic students come to college, in many cases, with a different mind-set than did some of their predecessors. As Mr. Lopez put it, “their experience is not an immigrant experience.”
But while community colleges’ enrollments are now growing more ethnically diverse than the nation’s population, their presidents’ offices are not. “This is the troubling news,” said Narcisa A. Polonia, the association’s executive vice president for education, research, and board-leadership services. According to a soon-to-be-published ACCT survey of 400 community-college presidents, about 84 percent are white, 8 percent are African-American, 5 percent are Hispanic-American, and 1 percent are Asian-American. (Two percent identified themselves as being of two or more races.)
The presidents also skew older: 45 percent are above age 60, 50 percent are 46 to 60, and just 5 percent are younger than 46.
The data were presented at a special session featuring the heads of five organizations now working to help train future community-college leaders:the Association of Community College Trustees, the American Association of Community Colleges, the League for Innovation in the Community College, Achieving the Dream, and the College Excellence Program at the Aspen Institute.
J. Noah Brown, president and chief executive of the trustees’ association, said the survey highlights that college trustees need to “reach out and be more embracing” of presidential candidates from more diverse backgrounds. In part, he said, that’s because to do otherwise is “sending the wrong signal” to many black and Hispanic students who attend community college.
It’s also a matter of pure numbers, he added. Community colleges are seeing an unprecedented turnover in their presidencies. In a transitional time for community- college leadership, he said, “the numbers won’t get you there unless you think differently about who we can attract to the presidency.”
