Latino students seeking college degrees in record numbers, but path is often fraught

Miguel Casimiro, a student at Northeastern Illinois University, looked at his biology grade and knew the time had come: He had to drop out.

The “F” he got came after several years filled with frustrations.

There was his commute — a 40-minute bus ride to classes from his job at his parent’s corner store. He worked two other jobs, too — one sitting at a desk and greeting students at the school and another at a video game store. And the relationship he was in wasn’t going well, and he was trying to figure out how to salvage it.

Urged by his parents and teachers, he’d worked hard to get into college, applying to 10 schools. Enrolling at Northeastern, he took part in a university support program, Proyecto Pa’Lante, geared toward Latino students who needed help getting a handle on the basics of academic life, like which classes count toward degrees. But the program was only for the first two years of school. After that, Casimiro was on his own.

A few days after grades were posted in 2014, Casimiro and his mother sat with an administrator at Northeastern Illinois. They agreed: He’d drop out rather than pay for another semester he could barely afford.

“I felt the help I was being offered wasn’t the help I wanted,” he says.

Pushed by parents and educators, more Hispanics than ever are attending college in the hopes of securing their place in the U.S. middle class. As they navigate the bureaucracy of higher education and grapple with paying tuition in an environment where, in many cases, they find few students, teachers and administrators look like them, some Latino students say higher education institutions happily take their money without working to ensure their needs are met.

The number of Hispanic students enrolled in college rose from 3.17 million in 2016 to 3.27 million in 2017, making them only one of two demographic groups that saw an increase in college attendance, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. That’s nearly double the 1.4 million Latino students who attended college in 2000.

College enrollment overall has been on the decline for years. According to the National Student Clearinghouse, there were 19.2 million students enrolled on campuses for the fall 2015 semester. By 2019, enrollment had dropped to 17.5 million.

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It used to be that colleges had a large pool of students to draw from. But retention rates among Hispanic students were “less than optimal,” says Deborah Santiago, one of the co-founders of Excelencia in Education, a Washington-based advocacy group focused on Latino students. But neglecting Hispanic students is bad business, Santiago says.

“You can’t just enroll them if you’re not going to help them graduate,” she says. “The only growth population is Hispanics. So we’re saying: You have got to focus on what it means to serve.”

Paying for and surviving college

About 70% of Latino undergraduates are from families in the bottom half of wage-earners, according to federal data analyzed by the college lobbying group the American Council on Education. That’s comparable to the nation’s African American population, where nearly 75% of students come from the bottom half of earners. About two of every three white students come from the top half of earners.

Nearly half of Latino students are the first in their family to go to college, according to data analyzed by Excelencia. Just under half were eligible for federal Pell Grants, given to those in great financial need. By comparison, one in five white students was first-generation, and about one in three qualified for Pell Grants. About 22% of Hispanics over 25 have an associate’s degree or higher, compared to 40% of the general population.

These financial strains can make surviving college especially difficult for Latino students.

Several times a week, Leslie Hurtado, 23, rushes to Northeastern Illinois’ computer lab to snag one of the few Apple computers. If she doesn’t get there first thing in the morning, she has to wait until after her classes have finished, and others have left the campus, when the computer lab isn’t as busy.

Hurtado, a Chicago native, says she wants to be a broadcast journalist and needs the video-editing software on these computers to do her homework because she can’t afford to buy it for her personal computer.

One night, long after classes, Hurtado sat in the computer lab, eyes half-closed from lack of sleep, stitching together footage of herself covering news on campus, including student protests of a talk by Sean Spicer, the former Trump White House spokesman. Her footage is usually shot on her iPhone because she says she can’t borrow a professional camera from the college. She does her homework when she’s not working as a teaching assistant.

It was an exhausting day. Hurtado had spent the early part of it at a government office trying to help her husband secure his legalization paperwork. He was one of the beneficiaries of the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals — DACA — program that offered immunity for two-year periods to immigrant children brought to this country without documentation.

Northeastern Illinois is the third college Hurtado has attended in five years. In 2014, she enrolled at Columbia College Chicago, attracted by promises of a diverse student body. But she says she often was the only Latino person in her class, and other students had parents who worked in the media industry, so they were more familiar with the field and, she felt, got more of the attention of the professors, many of them white.

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At colleges across the United States, about 73% of full-time professors are white; under 5% are Hispanic, while a little more than half of undergraduates nationally are white and just under 20% Hispanic .

Hurtado says she felt excluded. But even more troubling was the cost. Her father had urged her to go to college and offered to pay. But they didn’t realize what the cost would be. When her first $5,000-a-semester tuition bill came, he couldn’t pay. She dropped out midway through the semester.

“I came in there with no knowledge of what I was going to get into,” she says.

Hurtado says she wishes she had known to save money while in high school to help pay for school. Now, she feels behind since she is still a few semesters from graduation.

After dropping out of Columbia, Hurtado went to a community college briefly before transferring to Northeastern in the fall of 2018. She says she feels more at home there, where plenty of students look like her, and she reports for her classes on issues affecting Latinos.

The tuition is also more palatable. The average tuition at Northeastern for an in-state student is roughly $4,849. With her aid package, Hurtado’s bill is closer to $2,000.

But Hurtado questions what Northeastern does with the money she and other students pay. Like why did the school invest in a dorm when most of the students are commuters? And she can’t understand why money was spent to bring in Spicer, who drew protests. The Trump administration has taken a hard stance against immigration, a topic of great interest to many Northeastern students who are immigrants or have family members who are. She’d rather see money directed toward lowering her tuition or providing more resources to students.

She’s not alone in asking such questions. In one of the spacious hallways where students pass, Miriam Garcia, 23, was selling stickers on a recent day for a fundraiser for Alpha Psi Lambda, her coed Greek life group. She started her studies in criminal justice in 2014 and hopes to finish next fall.

Garcia says she knows people from her neighborhood who ended up in jail or or faced other difficulties. She hopes a college degree will help secure her place in the world.

But navigating financial aid each semester often leaves her flustered. Even small costs, like a mandatory bus fee, are galling when money is tight. She spends three days a week working at a dog daycare and says more help from the school would go a long way.

”I don’t even have a weekend,” she says.

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More universities are increasingly Hispanic

Most of Northeastern’s roughly 8,100 students commute to get to the North Side campus by bus or L via the Brown Line. The student population has fallen in recent years, but the percentage of Hispanic students has risen from 31% in 2010 to about 37% in 2018, the most recent year for which federal data is available.

The university started as a teaching college in 1867 and in 1961 was relocated to its current location at 5500 N. St. Louis Ave., near Bryn Mawr and Kimball avenues.

In the 1960s, it largely served middle-class white families in the area, but that changed as more Hispanic students sought the same higher education opportunities.

At one point in the early 1970s, Puerto Rican students pushed the school to better serve Hispanic students, which resulted in the creation of the academic support program Proyecto Pa’lante. At first, that was an effort to expand Hispanic recruitment, according to a history of the program written by Maximino Torres, a counselor and coordinator with the program during its founding.

Decades later, dozens of new students continued to enroll in the program. Many of them gathered on a recent Thursday in a lecture hall to discuss how to succeed at higher education.

“When you go on a road trip, do you plan it out?” the instructor, Elizabeth Villarreal, asked.

Tyler LaRiviere / Sun-Times

Making it to graduation is similar, she said. Students need a plan. They can take summer classes, for example, to speed the process.

Jorrin Andre, 18, was there. Later, he says he isn’t sure how long he will stay at Northeastern. Andre, a first-generation college student, says he finds the academic pace at Northeastern a little slow. And living in the dorm feels like living in an empty building, he says, not exactly the vibrant student life his family wanted for him when he enrolled.

Pa’lante is one of the services directed at Hispanic students at Northeastern. The university also has El Centro, a satellite campus that offers programs for Latinos, including a “Festivals de FAFSA” workshop geared toward helping Spanish-speaking students and their families fill out federal forms for financial aid. There also are classes during nontraditional hours — evenings and weekends — for students whose jobs might keep them from attending daytime classes.

Northeastern Illinois also has an administrator dedicated to helping undocumented students and a study space on the main campus, the Pedroso Center, aimed at helping students feel comfortable culturally and physically. There are plenty of couches to lounge on and also talks about Native American tribes and immigration issues.

Despite these programs, only about one in five students who start at the university will graduate in six years.

And the low tuition means the school can’t offer the flashiest student services, like high-tech gyms, multiple computer labs or student cafeterias equipped with sushi chefs.

But the school is doing what it can with limited resources, says Francisco X. Gaytan, an administrator.

“We meet them where they are,” Gaytan says. “If you truly believe that the United States is a place where you could get a leg up, then this is the prototypical American university. But you got to invest in it.”

Tyler LaRiviere / Sun-Times

Cost of college can be a barrier for Latinos

The success rates look more encouraging at North Park University, a private college less than a 10-minute walk from Northeastern. Visitors to North Park see an ornate, black metallic gate, trees and rolling lawns. The brick buildings with Greek-style columns will be familiar to anyone who has seen a college on a TV show. It’s also what some consider a traditional university in that a handful of North Park teams compete in the NCAA’s Division 3 sports, including soccer, football, cross-country and women’s rowing.

In the mid-1890s, the school was founded by the Evangelical Covenant Church, a Christian denomination for Swedish immigrants. Depending on the course material, classes were $4 to $7 a month, about $120 to $200 in today’s money. It graduated its first four-year class in 1960.

Today, most North Park first- or second-year students live on campus, which is associated with increasing the percentage of students who return for sophomore year. It also reduces the time they have to spend off-campus and tends to mean they have more time to study.

As at many colleges, the Hispanic student population at North Park is growing. In 2010, about 12% of the students were Hispanic. By 2018, that percentage more than doubled, to 30%.

Nearly 60% of students who started at the university in 2010 graduated in six years. Nearly three in four freshmen return for sophomore year. Roughly two in five students come from nonwhite families.

North Park costs about $40,000 a year, including room and board, though many students qualify for grants, scholarships and other aid.

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Pedro Garcia, who attended high school a few miles from North Park, applied because some of his friends had spoken highly of the university. At first, the cost stunned him. He had to scramble to scrounge money from friends and family to cover it.

Garcia is a DACA recipient, meaning he can’t access federal aid available to other students such as federal student loans or Pell Grants. He sayshe ended paying about $10,000 a year his freshman year because of financial aid from the university and private scholarships. His second year cost about half as much because he was a resident adviser, which offset his housing costs.

Garcia says he wishes tuition was lower so he wouldn’t have to work so hard to go there. The campus sometimes feels empty, he says, because so many students need a job to cover the cost.

Garcia went from a high school where Hispanic students were the majority and he had one white friend to a campus where there are ”a bunch of white people,” he says, and relatively few nonwhite professors.

”I have gotten used to being in situations where I am the only Hispanic,” he says.

Colleges seek federal money to serve Latino students

In the early 1990s, activists recognized similarities among schools serving Hispanic students and pushed for the designation, meant to help these schools get federal money. Many of these institutions have long been underfunded compared to others, in part because they charge low tuition, rely heavily on public funding and don’t have large endowments.

And with more institutions, including some that are large and well-funded, becoming Hispanic-serving institutions, more colleges and universities will be requesting help from that pool of federal money, meaning there will be less of it to go around.

That competition will extend to recruiting students as well. Which means more schools are going to have to step up to attract the best students.

But many aren’t prepared to do just that, experts say. These institutions aren’t monolithic, and that’s partially because many Hispanic-serving institutions didn’t start out intentionally to serve Latino students. They become Hispanic-serving often when the Latino population grows, says Vanessa Sansone, a professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio who studies these colleges.

The ones that do the best job of helping these students are mindful of the experiences Latino students bring with them, according to Sansone, and try to meet students in their communities and offer orientation materials in Spanish and English.

Santiago, one of the co-founders of Excelencia, says more colleges need to make sure students have access to financial aid and to hire more diverse faculty because students are pushing for these changes. The organization rates universities for tracking students, helping ensure they graduate and creating a welcoming culture for Latino students.

Going back to school to help other Latinos

For Casimiro, now 26, giving up on his education was never an option. After he dropped out of Northeastern in 2014, he enrolled in a community college for a semester to pull up his grades.

He knew that wouldn’t be enough to ensure his success. So when he enrolled at Northeastern again in 2015, he started a student group focused on the needs of Latino students. It had nine members initially and has grown to include 30 students. They’d discuss politics, watch movies and raise money for scholarships.

Casimiro loved his experience so much that he decided to continue at Northeastern after he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in communications. He is now taking classes for his master’s degree in the same subject.

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