By Nicole Catá, Policy Intern
The Pew Research Center has released a report entitled Minorities and the Recession-Era College Enrollment Boom that chronicles the 2008 jump in U.S. college enrollment, the highest in four decades. First, the good news, via the Huffington Post:
The nation’s colleges are attracting record numbers of new students as more Hispanics finish high school and young adults opt to pursue a higher education rather than languish in a weak job market. […] Almost three-quarters of the freshman increases in 2008 were minorities, of which the largest share was Hispanics.
These increases are undoubtedly good news for Latino communities. While the Pew Center attributes some of the spike in minority enrollment to demographic change, it is encouraging to know that Latino/as represent an increasingly larger percentage of college students. Specifically, the report notes that “freshman enrollment of Hispanics in higher education jumped by 15 percent in 2008, compared to 8 percent for blacks, 6 percent for Asians and 3 percent for whites.”
The report also details challenges for Latino/a students. Although Latino/as have seen a boom in college enrollment, they still “lag overall”: they comprise about 12 percent of full-time undergraduate and graduate students, whereas they account for 16 percent of the total U.S. population. Richard Fry, the author of the report, explains:
These findings are only half reassuring… Many Hispanic teens still are not graduating high school, and the high school gains may not be sustained when the teen labor market revives. It also remains to be seen how many of these additional minority freshmen will actually complete degrees.
These details are especially pertinent to the lives of young Latino/as, many of whom forgo a college education when financial aid is unavailable. This is particularly true of documented immigrants who are not legal residents, and of undocumented immigrants, but it is also the case that merit-based scholarships tend to support high-income and white students and that immigrants and children of immigrants may not have access to information about their rights and prospects for pursuing college. The Latina Institute suggests the following strategies to meaningfully address these disparities:
[…] many Latino youth sorely need material improvements in the quality of public high school education and standard tuition remission for low-income students to attend college or trade school.
Implementing such strategies would ensure that even more Latino/a youth could pursue a college education. Here’s hoping that future college enrollment booms improve on the 2008 trends.
By Nicole Catá, Policy Intern
Here’s hoping the the boom in college enrollment will allow for more Hispanic/Latino youth to pursue their dreams and follow a path into their chosen profession. I am enrolled in a cultural competency course and we have been having discussions about health disparities and how to overcome them. Among other ideas, it is important when dealing with culturally diverse populations to have language concordant and culturally competent care providers. In a variety of research it has been stated that when people have an opportunity to be seen by those that they can identify with and clearly communicate, that they feel a higher satisfaction in the care that they receive.
It is my greatest hope that people from all walks of life can have an opportunity to pursue their dreams and to not have to forgo school because they don’t have the resources to do so. I think creating an opportunity for members of minority groups who have a desire to do so, to pursue an education in healthcare would powerfully and positively impact the state of health disparities among those persons most deeply impacted by them.