http://www.azstarnet.com/star/today/20716editcollegeforlatin.html
Tuesday, 16 July 2002
A new study from the Tomás Rivera Policy Institute gives us a glimpse into only one of the many barriers American Hispanics face in getting into college.
What the institute found, not surprisingly, is that the pipeline to a college education begins at home. Specifically, it begins with the knowledge of parents who encourage, advise and nourish the expectations of a college education.
But in most Hispanic families, that pipeline does not exist because the parents themselves have no history of a college education. Indeed, getting out of high school with a diploma is an accomplishment among a group of people whose dropout rates stand at somewhere between a third and half of the entire Hispanic population.
Despite that appalling dropout figure, the institute said that 96 percent of parents surveyed for this study expect their children to go to college. Clearly there is a disconnect between the expectations parents have for their children and the reality of getting to college.
And surely one of those disconnects has to be that parents who have no college experience have no basis from which to assist their children with their college aspirations. For example, the institute gave 41 of the 1,000 parents it surveyed a test on factual knowledge about college. Of those, 65 percent failed the test. The questions tested information parents should know in order to prepare their children for college.
But the institute also offers several suggestions for positive change, including:
* Make increased college attendance a performance measure for high schools.
* Create long-term public service announcements in both Spanish and English.
* Create long-term college outreach programs for Hispanic parents in low-income communities.
The value of the institute's findings and suggestions are that it does not take an approach based on cultural deficits. Indeed, it is the larger culture that is lacking the knowledge and the determination to help a growing Latino population take its place in the 21st century democracy.
The Rivera institute's suggestions are convincing precisely because it is a Latino organization recommending changes to help bring Latinos to prosperity.
To be sure, there are many, many reasons that Hispanics drop out of high school in the numbers that they do. And there are just as many reasons that Hispanics are severely underrepresented in our nation's colleges and universities.
Yet, the idea that this country can prosper in the future without an educated Hispanic population is to deny the existence of the huge numbers of Latinos.
For the sake of continued prosperity and in the name of a peaceful democracy, this country must come to terms with the idea that it must create a way to educate Hispanics.
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