Shifting the Conversation
At a time when national enrollment trends were declining, Latinx-student enrollment had been growing consistently. Before the pandemic, the number of Latinx students seeking degrees for the first time was increasing steadily, according to U.S. Department of Education data.
That all changed once Covid-19 hit.
Minority students were affected the most, and colleges saw steep declines in their enrollment and retention. Latinx and Black students experienced lower retention rates than did Asian American and white students, and comprised the biggest drops at public two-year institutions in the fall of 2020, according to National Student Clearinghouse data.
This year, Latinx students’ first-time enrollment dropped by nearly 20 percent.
But Deborah Santiago, co-founder and chief executive of Excelencia in Education, an advocacy organization for Latinx student success, says the number of programs designed to address the needs for these students continues to grow. And to combat declines in enrollment and retention, they’re getting bolder about their commitment to the Latinx community.
Her organization’s Examples of Excelencia project was established in 2005 to draw attention to these programs and shift the conversation around Latinx students’ challenges.
“The whole dialogue is very deficit based,” Santiago said. She emphasized that people tend to draw attention to what Latinx students are lacking, but may not discuss programing that is providing results. “People are doing good work.”
Santiago says that the racial reckoning of last year helped to put Latinx students in the spotlight.
“For a while it was hard to get others to pay attention to this portfolio of work. It’s always mattered, but the spotlight hasn’t really been on these efforts,” she said.
Santiago and her team have recognized a handful of programs dedicating themselves to the direct support of Latinx students. The programs that were chosen had mission statements that were specific and intentional in their focus on Latinx students, realistic and measurable goals, and displayed growth over time.
“Whereas before it was by chance that Hispanics are participating in a broader program, now we are seeing more programs that are tailored to the strengths and opportunities of educating Latinos than we have seen in the past,” she said.
Here’s how a few of these programs are focusing on Latinx students:
The Ambiciones program at Howard Community College
In Maryland, Howard Community College’s Ambiciones program wants to provide a pathway to college completion for Latinx students. Goals include increasing retention rates of first-year participants and also raising transfer and graduation rates.
Housed in the college’s Academic Support Center, with dedicated staff members, Ambiciones is geared toward first-generation-college students, guiding high-school seniors through the college-application process and helping undocumented students who are enrolling through the Dream Act and the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program understand the requirements. It also offers networking opportunities, social events, and tutoring to build a supportive community for students.
The method is working; Ambiciones saw a retention rate of 80 percent for first-year participants, compared with less than 60 percent for students who weren’t in the program, according to Santiago.
Participating students are also performing better academically. Santiago said over 70 percent of program participants have a GPA above 2.0, an increase from last year. More than 90 percent of program participants were in good academic standing overall.
Ambiciones is also a good example of a program that uses indicators of cultural relevance to attract students, Santiago said. By having a Spanish word as its name, Santiago said, it positions itself to attract students who may be bilingual and feel a sense of belonging when they see a word they recognize.
Pioneras at Texas Woman’s University
The Pioneras program at Texas Woman’s University wants to help bilingual students take advantage of the Spanish skills they already have and increase the number of Spanish teachers in Texas.
Specially designed undergraduate courses that are taught in Spanish aim to better prepare students for the university’s language-proficiency exams. Program coordinators understand that the Spanish students speak at home with their parents may be different than what is taught in the classroom. So Pioneras uses “translanguaging,” switching between dialects in a sentence, as a tool to make students more comfortable with both ways of speaking.
It also sends its students to an all-expenses-paid, three-week study-abroad program in Central America, where they can interact with other native speakers and work with the Spanish programs at local public schools.
Spanish teacher-certification courses are also offered to respond to the statewide shortage of bilingual certified teachers in north Texas schools. And graduate students who came out of the Pioneras program are encouraged to work with and mentor undergraduates in the program.
In recent years, students scored higher on Texas’ Bilingual Target Language Proficiency Test after completing the program, and their speaking and writing skills also improved.
Joint Engineering Program, Hostos Community College and CUNY
For many students in the South Bronx, Hostos Community College is their primary opportunity for a postsecondary degree — it’s the only public college in the area. Hostos is also a Hispanic-serving institution, with about 65 percent of the student population identifying as Hispanic or Latino.
Hostos teamed up with the City College of New York’s Grove School of Engineering to create a joint dual-admission engineering degree program that makes it easier for students to transfer to the four-year institution, building a stronger pipeline to get students from underrepresented groups into the STEM field. The engineering curricula are aligned between the two colleges so that students have the right foundation of knowledge to succeed when they transfer.
Students have networking and tutoring opportunities, and are required to take specific engineering classes at the Grove School of Engineering before transferring. —Oyin Adedoyin