A ‘Big Idea’ for Higher Education
Colleges must create new venues to reach and recruit
under-represented students.
There is no shortage of ideas in the world of higher education. But many college and university leaders don’t spend nearly enough time thinking about the big picture. Right now, we’ve only begun to scratch the surface of one of the biggest challenges ahead for higher education: reaching out to traditionally underserved students from the Hispanic community. Hispanics are on the brink of becoming a majority population in this country, and to address this challenge, what we need are some big ideas.
California’s student population offers a preview of what is soon to become a national trend. At the California State University system, the country’s largest four-year university system, with more than 400,000 students, only 7 percent of the student body is African-American. The Hispanic population at CSU is much higher, at 26 percent. However, it is comparably small considering that 35 percent of California’s high school graduates are Hispanic.
To say African-American and Hispanic students deserve special attention is an understatement. Student enrollment numbers for these groups are not going to rise if we don’t first do something about their academic eligibility to attend a university. They continue to struggle in high school. For African-Americans, particularly males, even completing high school has become the exception rather than the rule.
The California Postsecondary Education Commission reports that only 19 percent of African-American and 16 percent of Hispanic high school graduates would have qualified to attend either CSU or the University of California system in 2003. By comparison, 48 percent of Asian
and 34 percent of White high school graduates were eligible.
Are our educators and communities doing enough to help these students get information and take the courses they need to prepare for college? Probably not. In many cases, these students do well in high school, but they didn’t have the resources or the information they needed to take the proper coursework or prepare for a postsecondary education.
