“Access and cost, I think would explain a lot of it,” says Dr. Stephen Trejo, associate professor of economics at the University of Texas at Austin and a member of the National Research Council panel that produced the report.
“Two-year colleges are close to being free in most places, and four-year colleges are a lot more expensive,” he says. “It’s location, too. Among Hispanic kids, there’s a tendency for cost reasons and maybe for family reasons to not want to move away for a college that’s far. Two-year colleges tend to be local, whereas four-year colleges aren’t always local.”
This study on Hispanics in the United States was sponsored by numerous government and philanthropic agencies, including the Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research at the National Institutes of Health, the U.S. Census Bureau and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The National Academies’ Congressionally chartered mission is to advise the federal government on scientific and technology matters.
The report will be available to the public later this spring from the National Academies Press <www.nap.edu>.
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