"Education can be a catalyst to achieving a wide variety of goals,"
says University of Phoenix faculty member Dr. Chris Mendoza. Mendoza's
life story is testament to that statement: Though he graduated high
school reading at a "seventh or eighth grade level," through application
and hard work he moved up the educational ladder, earning a college
degree (University of Texas at El Paso, 1981), an MBA, and a doctorate
in business administration (University of Phoenix, 2007). He is now a
successful executive who heads the recruiting and marketing department
for a division of a Fortune 200 financial services company.
Stories
like Mendoza's are becoming more common as Latino immigrants come to
the U.S., make a better living, and send their children to college.
Though the situation is improving, Latinos still have yet to catch up to
other ethnicities in educational achievement. Latinos are the least
educated major population group in the nation, with Latino males only
having an average of 10.6 years of schooling, compared with an average
of 12.2 years for black males and 13.3 years for white males.1 Only 11%
of Latinos ages 25 and over have a bachelor's degree, versus 29% of
whites and 25% of other non-Hispanics.2.
The problem is not that
Latinos are failing to attend college, or that they lack understanding
of the value of an education. In fact, only Asian high school graduates
attend college at higher rates than do Latinos.3 Nearly 9 out of 10
(88%) Hispanics ages 18 to 25 say that college is important for getting
ahead in life, and 77% say their parents think going to college is the
most important thing they can do after high school.4 The issue of
concern is that too many Latinos are leaving college without earning a
degree.
Also of interest is the fact that Latino women are
outpacing Latino men in terms of educational attainment. In 2006, for
example, only 41% of Latino undergraduates were male.5 This disparity is
all the more startling given that the gender gap seems to be leveling
off for males of other ethnicities.6.
In part, the difference in
Latinos' and Latinas' educational achievement can be explained by the
fact that more Latinas go back to school as adults (ages 25 and up). But
many other factors-cultural, societal, and economic-intertwine to
explain both the gender gap and why Latinos are not earning
postsecondary degrees at a rate proportional to other ethnic groups.
Many Latino Men Feel Pressure to Enter the Workforce Rather than Pursue a
Degree.
Most Latino students are nontraditional students: Many are
over 25, attend school part-time, opt for two-year programs rather than
four-year ones, and have parents, children, spouses, or other family
members to support.7 The selfsame factors that make a student
nontraditional, however, have been identified as risk factors for degree
noncompletion by the U.S. Department of Education.8.
And a large
number of these students work while attending school, which may be one
reason why they opt to attend school part-time. In many low-income or
working-class immigrant families, young people feel a responsibility to
contribute to the family's income as soon as they are old enough to
work. A sizeable proportion of young immigrants drop out of high school
in order to work full time. (Second-generation Latinos ages 16 to 19, in
contrast, are four times more likely to be in school and not working at
all than immigrants from their same age group.)9 Nearly three-quarters
of 16- to 25-year old Latinos who had ended their education while in or
shortly after high school say they did so in order to support their
families.10 This emphasis on work may be one reason fewer Hispanic men
than women attain college degrees.