Dr. Patricia Gándara, a University of California, Los Angeles, education professor and author of the new book The Latino Education Crisis: The Consequences of Failed Social Policies, told a crowd in a Senate conference room that her objective “was to try to make clear how terribly urgent this is.”
At the conference sponsored by the American Youth Policy Forum, Gándara presented dire statistics: While Blacks and Whites have shown significant progress in college graduation rates over the past 30 years, the rates of Latinos have barely changed at all. The percentage of 25- to 29-year-old Latinos with bachelor’s degrees or higher rose to a mere 11 percent in 2005 as compared to 9 percent in 1975. The number for Blacks rose from 11 to 18 percent; for Whites, it was 24 to 34 percent over the same three decades.
Gándara said a solution is essential because Latinos, as the largest minority and the fastest-growing ethnic group in the nation, will make up one-fourth of the nation’s students by 2025.
Sarita Brown, president of Excelencia in Education, a nonprofit group that works to accelerate Latino success in higher education, agreed: “It is the future workforce and leadership.”
Brown said Latinos are widely viewed as undocumented immigrants who cannot speak English and drop out of high school but stressed that most Latino students do not fit the stereotypes.
Most, she said, are U.S.-born, English-dominant U.S. citizens and high school graduates. The problem, she said, is that they approach college in nontraditional ways and that public policies have not kept up with them.
