Minority report; Colleges confront disparity in achievement by low-income students
/- Originally published in The Boston Herald February 8, 2005
By WAMBUI WAMUNYU (SPECIAL TO THE HERALD)
Andres Tejada's story reflects that of many Hispanic college students. Tejada, born in the Dominican Republic but raised in the United States, found it difficult to afford college. Tejada relied on his family and financial aid to help him through the undergraduate degree program in computer science at Northeastern University.
Tejada, who still dreams of getting a master's degree in computer science after he finishes paying off his loans, now works almost 40 hours a week and contributes most of his paycheck to his family's household expenses. Tejada lives with his family in Lynn.
"After everything I've been through, now's not the time to give up,'' Tejada said.
Although Tejada was able to complete college, he knows he's one of the lucky ones. A report released last summer by the Pew Hispanic Center, a nonpartisan research institute in Washington, D.C., said Hispanic college students are only half as likely as white students to complete a bachelor's degree.
``Suppose you take equally prepared kids and put them on the same kinds of campuses, still Latinos are trailing whites,'' said Richard Fry, the report's author. There is no single reason why Hispanics are less likely to graduate, but social and economic factors combine to make it more difficult for them to finish.
The number of minority students _ Blacks, Hispanics, Asians and American Indians _ enrolling in degree and continuing education programs has grown since the 1980s. Alongside those gains have come increased numbers of ethnic studies programs and minority support services on campuses. But disparities in educational achievement for students of color _ in particular African-American and Latino students and low-income, urban students _ has widened.
According to the Journal of Higher Education, blacks and other non-Asian minority students attending predominantly white colleges are less likely to graduate within five years, have lower grade-point averages, experience higher attrition rates and matriculate into graduate programs at lower rates than white students.
For some, this achievement gap is purely economic.
``I see friends who couldn't do more than one or two years at Northeastern and had to leave because they couldn't afford it,'' said Nadine Yaver, a Northeastern junior studying criminal justice. ``Disproportionately, it has happened to blacks and Latinos.''
Minorities from low-income backgrounds often find themselves an anomaly on campus. Richard Kahlenberg, author of ``America's Untapped Resource: Low-Income Students and Higher Education,'' said the gap between college enrollment rates of low-income students and those of middle-class and affluent students remains as large as it was in 1965, when the Higher Education Act was instituted.
``If you look at the breakdown by economic status at the 146 most selective universities, we have a 3 percent representation from low-income students and a 74 percent representation from the most affluent. So you're about 25 times as likely to run into a rich student as a poor student on the nation's elite campuses,'' he said.
And although minority student enrollment has grown on many campuses, such as at Bunker Hill Community College, where the student minority population is 60 percent, Andres Torres, director of the Mauricio Gaston Institute at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, argues the numbers don't show the difference between ``home-grown'' and foreign-born minorities.
Torres said some of these students may come from elite schools abroad, and have access to a greater number of resources and quality education compared to minorities attending public schools in the United States. Yet they are categorized in the same way.
``We've had difficulty in determining the real representation of real home-grown minorities,'' Torres said. ``You may have in those numbers students from Latin America and Asia. In which case that representation is inflated and therefore not a true indicator of how public schools are doing in producing entrants of minorities.
``We have a long way to go before our higher education system can say they are providing true access to higher education across the board to the various segments of our society,'' Torres said. ``The Latino piece is an indicator toward the problematic side of things.''
Elena Quiroz, director of Northeastern University's Latino/Latina Student Cultural Center, said the number of Latino students enrolled in full-time degree programs at the school has remained stable for a number of years.
``There's not a great increase in numbers,'' she said, adding that a variety of factors come up during discussions about Latino enrollments. Many of the students don't always receive a quality high school education, they end up hunting for colleges on their own, receive financial aid packages that don't keep up with rising tuition costs and work multiple jobs while attending school.
But there have been inroads made for minorities, thanks to community outreach programs, the growth of more academic research and ethnic studies course development as well as minority support services. Yaver, the Northeastern junior studying criminal justice, said the Latino/Latina Student Cultural Center helped her ``find a home on campus.''
The Gaston Institute is one of several at UMass-Boston engaging in research specific to particular minority groups. There are plans for another institute focused on Native American studies.
Barbara Lewis, director of the William Monroe Trotter Institute for the Study of Black Culture at UMass-Boston, said there are plans to develop a course ``which looks at the connections between African-Americans and Native Americans.''
Another proposal in the works is for new graduate students in the school of education to take a series of walking tours in different segments of Boston.
``We're working on ways to make the graduate school of education more responsive to the history of African-Americans in Boston,'' she said.
UMass also has outreach programs to high-schoolers and recently received a grant to look at science and math achievement rates in Boston public schools, said Winston Langley, associate provost at the UMass-Boston.
But Langley cautions that the education of minority populations needs more attention.
``The fallout is that we have a society with larger and larger numbers of younger people who are less able to contribute to the growth and development of society,'' Langley said. ``If more significantly, it's on the shoulders of these young people that we depend on for the payment of Social Security, for the continuation of the edge that the U.S. has in science and technology. I think any neglect of this community is a neglect of the society as a whole.''
