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Emphasis on Academic Support, Use of Data in Decisionmaking, Revamped Community Outreach
Are Significant Factors in Success with Latino Students, Study Says
WASHINGTON, D.C. (June 18) – As Latino representation in higher education continues to increase
across all states and institution types, Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs)—public or private nonprofit
degree-granting colleges with 25 percent or more Hispanic undergraduate enrollment—provide a valuable
laboratory to study practices that help improve Latino access, retention, and academic success.
A new report by the Washington, D.C.-based higher education policy group, Excelencia in Education,
reveals that it is no accident that some institutions have high Latino enrollments and degree production..
These campuses have worked deliberately to implement broad-scale changes in everything from
improving academic support and community relations to implementing new data systems that strengthen
decisionmaking and enable campus leaders, faculty, and staff to better monitor what is happening with
their Latino student population. This report and the case studies from which it is drawn were supported by
Lumina Foundation for Education.
“What we see across the most successful institutions are comprehensive efforts to improve the quality of
the academic experience and to meet student needs for a rapidly growing, non-traditional, and diverse
Latino population,” said Deborah Santiago, Vice President for Research and Policy for Excelencia in
Education and the author of the report. “The HSIs we examined made reinventing academic support for
Latino students and all students a top priority.”
“What was particularly impressive was how these student-rich and resource-poor institutions have
increased results for Latinos under increasingly tight economic constraints,” noted Sarita Brown,
president of Excelencia in Education. “Leaders of these institutions have made great strides to ensure
success while addressing diverse Latino enrollment patterns and pathways to degree completion. Their
strategies need to be studied more extensively and copied more expansively nationwide.”
The report, Modeling Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs): Campus Practices that Work for Latino
Students, focuses on 12 institutions—six community colleges and six public universities—in three states
that are among the nation’s leaders in Latino enrollment and degree completion. They include:
Emphasis on Academic Support
While institutions are involved in many areas that support their students’ success, the practices of all 12
HSIs emphasized academic support. Particularly powerful were strategies introduced to strengthen
developmental education, cohort support programs, and academic advising, the study says.
All the colleges offer courses that prepare students for college-level work, and some have created free
summer or winter immersion programs to prepare incoming and returning students for placement exams
in English, writing, and mathematics. All of the campuses have also invested considerable resources in
examining student data and designing interventions to strengthen freshmen student performance. For
example, El Camino College offers a First Year Experience program where student persistence and pass
rates were 10 to 30 percent higher for enrolled students than for a comparative group that did not
participate. South Texas College’s Beacon Advisement Program provides a case management approach
to student advising and has seen a fall-to-spring retention rate of 76 percent for students in the program
compared to 69 percent for a comparative group that did not participate.
Bolstering Community Outreach
The colleges studied have developed partnerships with local school districts and businesses to help
Latino students pursue college degrees. In addition, since so many Hispanic students begin their higher
education at a community college, community outreach also includes programs that facilitate transfers
from community college to public universities. One of the strongest models of collaboration between K-12
feeder schools, a community college, and a university partner is that of the El Paso Learning
Collaborative. El Paso Community College and the University of Texas at El Paso are working to align
their curriculum and to ease transitions so that students do not get lost, and for the past decade have
used resources from the National Science Foundation to provide summer programs and tuition support
for students transferring to programs in science, engineering, and mathematics.
Data Use
The institutions recognize the importance of using data to inform their support programs and institutional
decisionmaking. They have established a culture of evidence and have democratized data use, sharing
information on student success broadly with faculty, staff, students, and the community. By building
awareness about the challenges all students (and especially Latino and other minority students) face,
these institutions are able to gain insights from different subsets of their campuses to strengthen
programs and services. For example, CUNY-New York City College of Technology participated in
Building Engagement and Attainment of Minority Students (BEAMS) as a way to collect, disaggregate,
and use data to guide institutional practices and support for their students overall, and their minority
students in particular.
Recommendations for Other Institutions
Excelencia in Education’s observations of the 12 campuses, along with its work exploring institutional
practices and state policy options to bolster Latino student success in several states, has led to the
identification of several guiding practices that may be useful to other institutions experiencing growing
Latino student enrollment and seeking to serve nontraditional students:
- Create a culture of evidence at the institution to encourage the use of disaggregated data to better
understand how Latino and other students are performing and to guide campus decisions and initiatives.
- Share data on Latino students with faculty, staff, and students at least once a year so that they
know how students are performing and can become more engaged in institutional efforts.
- Use short-term measures of academic progress to guide improvements in curricula, instruction,
and support services for Latino students. Using short-term measures of academic progress engages
faculty in the scholarship of student success and focuses their efforts to improve their own students’
achievement and their institutions’ capacity to serve students.
- Encourage and support the sharing of disaggregated student data between community colleges
and baccalaureate-granting institutions to help establish better transfer pathways and to understand
the barriers and facilitators for Latino college student success.
- Provide a holistic approach to serving Latino students within the institution. Incorporate
leadership, research, academic programs, support services, and student life programs. Too often these
programs and services operate independently and may be either duplicative or ineffective in reaching the
students who need them the most to succeed.
- Partner with other educational organizations in the community to align educational resources.
Engaging “feeder” high schools, community colleges, public universities, and community-based
organizations already investing in students can increase Latino student preparation, access, and
persistence to degree completion. Latino students tend to enroll in colleges in their own community, so
there is a rich opportunity to align educational services in the K-16 pathway to better support students.
- Seek external sources to develop and test innovative practices while adding proven practices to
the institutional budget. Many institutions with growing Latino enrollment face limited resources and a
growing need to improve student achievement. Each of the institutions in this study actively sought and
received additional federal, state, or private support to finance their student success activities. Once
practices were developed, implemented, and evaluated, leaders added to their institutions’ budgets the
ones that proved most successful.
- Apply lessons learned in improving services to Latinos to improve services for all students.
Institutional practices that demonstrate effectiveness in serving Hispanics are likely to serve other
students well and can be institutionalized to improve overall student success.
Later this year, Excelencia in Education will release two more briefs that probe more deeply into HSI
leadership strategies and success measures at these 12 institutions.
- Excelencia in Education aims to accelerate higher education success for Latino students by providing
data-driven analysis of the educational status of Latino students, and by promoting education policies and
institutional practices that support their academic achievement. A 501(c)(3) organization, Excelencia is
building a network of results-oriented educators and policymakers adding value to their individual efforts
with the momentum to address the U.S. economy’s need for a highly educated workforce.
- For more information, visit the organization’s Web site, www.EdExcelencia.org.
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