ARLINGTON, Va. – In order to ensure better college access and success for Latino students from low-income backgrounds, institutions should help them put together college plans in the eighth grade and help them navigate the complex array of family dynamics and social forces in their lives.

That was one of the take-home points that University of Maryland higher education professor Alberto Cabrera offered up Thursday while presenting at a research conference titled Building Better Students: Preparation for Life After High School. The Educational Testing Service, the College Board, and the American Educational Research Association sponsored the conference. 

“The main message that we want to convey to you is that success in college and beyond is seeded in the eighth grade, if not earlier,” Cabrera, a professor at the University of Maryland at College Park, told the conferees.

“Intervention strategies for retention start too late and don’t address problems that can be traced back to eighth grade,” Cabrera said, citing statistics from a study he conducted that found that, out of 1,000 eighth grade Latino youths from a lower socioeconomic status, 714 left high school unqualified for college, 134 were minimally qualified and only 151 were fully qualified. And that was despite the fact that 80 percent of them had intentions to go to college back when they were in the eighth grade.

“So the first thing that begs to be answered is: What happened?” Cabrera said.

That question was largely answered later Thursday at the Latino Youth Forum 2010 at the Newseum in Washington, D.C. There, a vivid example of the need for the kind of planning that Cabrera prescribed unfolded when forum moderator and noted journalist Ray Suarez asked the two dozen or so high school students in the studio audience how many would be the first in their family to graduate from high school or college. The vast majority of the youths’ hands went up.

Many of the youths spoke of friends and relatives who dropped out of high school for reasons that ranged from the need to work to help their families make ends meet to falling victim to self-doubt bred by stereotypes that cast Latino youth as academically deficient or prone to crime or unwed pregnancy.