PHILADELPHIA — For some Hispanic students, navigating the college application process can be a double-whammy: Balancing high school coursework with essays and interviews, and then translating the whole system for their parents, who don’t speak English.
Some venerable East Coast universities are trying to ease that burden — and tap the booming pool of Hispanic students — by offering Spanish translations of their admissions and financial aid material.
Bryn Mawr College, an elite women’s liberal arts school near Philadelphia, recently launched a Spanish version of its Web site. And the Ivy League University of Pennsylvania has begun conducting some college admissions sessions in Spanish.
“These initiatives are really geared toward the families … to take some of the pressure off the students,” said Jennifer Rickard, Bryn Mawr’s chief enrollment officer.
Family comfort level is extremely important in the Hispanic community, where parental ties are strong and many are wary of sending their children away to school, said Deborah Santiago, vice president for policy and research at Washington-based Excelencia in Education.
“The parents do play a critical role in at least the aspiration of college,” Santiago said. “My parents hadn’t gone to college but they told me I was going.”
Nationwide, only 25 percent of Hispanics ages 18 to 24 were in college in 2006. That compares with 32 percent of Blacks, 44 percent of Whites and 61 percent of Asian-Americans, according to a report by the American Council on Education. But the same report found that Hispanic college enrollment increased 66 percent between 1995 and 2005.
