UCLA Study Reveals Growing Gender Gap Among Hispanic College Students

Hispanic women are enrolling at higher rates than ever as full-time freshmen at four-year colleges and universities. They’re more likely to aspire to doctoral degrees. Their self-rated drive to achieve is higher than any other group.

Those are some of the findings in a report on Hispanic college freshmen released Thursday by the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles’ Graduate School of Education & Information Studies. The study — gleaned from three decades of freshman survey responses — provided more detail in the widening gender gap between Hispanic male and female college students.|

While women are outperforming men across all ethnic and racial groups, the gap between male and female Hispanics is the most pronounced. Last week, the American Council on Education reported that in high school completion rates, there is a 10-point gap between Hispanic males (63 percent) and females (73 percent). That same 10-point difference exists when it comes to college enrollment rates. While 31 percent of college-age Hispanic women are enrolled in college; just 21 percent of college-age Hispanic men are.

Despite the gap, Hispanics’ numbers in higher education are improving, says Dr. Sylvia Hurtado, director of the Higher Education Research Institute and a co-author of UCLA’s “Advancing in Higher Education: A Portrait of Latino College Freshmen at Four-Year Institutions, 1975-2006.”

“Both groups are growing in higher education. That means women are growing at a faster rate,” says Hurtado, who, as a college freshman more than 30 years ago, responded to the Cooperative Institutional Research Program freshman survey that is the basis for her report today. “I answered these in 1976, and when I went to college, there were more males than females.”

In the year Hurtado was a freshman, Hispanics made up 1.2 percent of college and university freshmen. Today, they are 8.2 percent of college freshmen. (If two-year colleges are included, that number increases to 11 percent.)