“Access and cost, I think, would explain a lot of it,” says NRC panelist Dr. Stephen Trejo, an associate professor of economics at the University of Texas at Austin.
“Two-year colleges are close to being free in most places and four-year colleges are a lot more expensive. … 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,” he says.
Tienda says cost is often the final obstacle that keeps Hispanic students from attending college.
“Hispanics have a higher proportion of first-generation college-goers because of their parents’ average educational attainment, and have a greater risk aversion to taking on more debt,” she says.
This study on Hispanics in the United States was sponsored by a number of 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.
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