I Don't Know How I Feel About This

Better learn Spanish if you're going to stay in Texas. I am not a Pat Buchanan xenophobe; the demographic reality is upon us. In fact, no matter where you live, you had better learn Spanish. And learn to like salsa at Chi Chi's. If this be (fair & balanced) nativism, so be it.

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A Texas-Size Challenge
With the stakes high, public colleges in the state seek more Hispanic students
By MICHAEL ARNONE

Austin
At 8:30 a.m., as the University of Texas at Austin slowly comes to life, 50 Houston high-school students disembark from their bus. They are visiting the university through its "Longhorn for a Day" program, which invites the best students from schools that traditionally have not sent many to the Austin campus. Nearly half are Hispanic; most of the rest are black, with a sprinkling of whites and Asians.

At the student union, the students are soon sitting bleary-eyed in a conference room, doughnuts in hand and "Be a Longhorn" T-shirts on their backs. They yawn as a stream of university officials -- all but one white -- encourage them to join the honors program and obtain as much financial aid as possible.

The students perk up only when Stephen A. Torres, the student director of the university's Multicultural Information Center, starts talking. "When you come to a campus with 50,000 people, what's the first thing you look for?" asks the burly Mexican-American engineering student. "To see a person who looks like you."

They pepper Mr. Torres with questions as he describes the many student-run groups at the university that help minority students feel more at home. "The truth is that at UT," he says, "there ain't a lot of people who look like me." When he finishes, the students cheer.

Roughly 14 percent of Austin's 51,400 students are Hispanic in a state where one in three residents is Hispanic. With few exceptions, Texas colleges have had little success in getting Hispanic students to enroll. Only 9 percent of Hispanics age 15 to 34 in the state attended college in 2002, compared with 13 percent of blacks and 17 percent of whites in that age bracket.

The stakes are high if the Austin campus and the state's other colleges fail to attract more Hispanic students: By 2030, Texas risks having a smaller proportion of college-educated residents than it does today. That's because Hispanics are expected to number 21.5 million within 30 years, more than the state's total population in 2000 and projected to be half the state's population in 2030. One result? The state could lose some $78.5-billion in household income as more residents without a college education take low-paying jobs.

"The implications of failure are for Texas to end up having a population that will be poorer and less competitive than it is today," warns Steve H. Murdock, a professor of rural sociology at Texas A&M University at College Station and the state demographer.

More Aid Is Needed

If colleges are to enroll more Hispanics, say state officials, high schools and colleges must ensure that Hispanic students know how to get into college, and many institutions must tailor their pitches and advertisements to Hispanics more directly and in ways that are sensitive to Latino culture.

Above all, though, college officials and students agree that the state must provide more financial aid, particularly grants. Hispanic families in Texas earn on average only $31,000 a year, the lowest of any ethnic group in the state. Many Hispanic students already work part or full time to help their families pay the bills. So $15,000 to pay tuition for four years at the average public university in the state is a mountain of money for them, a mountain that many say they cannot climb without the help of the government, their families, and their high schools.

Located five miles south of the Austin campus, William B. Travis High School might as well be a world away. Eighty-five percent Hispanic, the school sends less than half of its students to college and only a fraction to UT's nearby flagship. Out of the 274 students in the Class of 2003, 80 went to two-year colleges. Thirty went to four-year colleges, nine to UT-Austin.

Angela Vallejo, a senior at Travis, is one of the few students who wants a four-year degree. Ranked in the top 10 percent of her class, she will automatically be admitted to UT-Austin and Texas A&M, the state's two flagship universities, under Texas' law to increase diversity at its public institutions. But she is concerned about paying for college. Right now, she has a part-time job as a checker at a supermarket to help her parents and to provide for her 4-year-old son, Robert. She wants to major in business administration at Sul Ross State University, in Alpine, but she won't be able to pay the $3,402 annual bill for tuition and fees without financial aid.

The state's primary financial-aid program, the four-year-old Texas Grant, has favored Hispanics. It pays college costs for those who complete a college-preparatory curriculum in high school and show financial need. In 2001-2, Hispanics received 46 percent of the 45,722 grants given out. But this fall -- even as lawmakers increased appropriations for the program by nearly 10 percent, or $29-million, in the 2003-5 biennial budget -- some 28,800 eligible applicants, many of them Hispanic, were left empty-handed because there was not enough money. The state renewed roughly 44,400 awards it had already given to current students before handing out only 17,100 new ones to incoming students.

State aid is not tight just for students. The Legislature is cutting back on money to colleges, too. Texas grappled with a $9.9-billion budget deficit last spring, and lawmakers eventually cut appropriations to higher education by 1.7 percent, to $10.1-billion, over the next two years. The cuts led more than half of the state's two-year public colleges and one-third of the four-year colleges to raise tuition, and pushed many institutions to freeze salaries, halt construction, and cut their own budgets for financial aid.

Cultural Hurdles

Money is not the only obstacle for Hispanics. For some students, their own culture and preconceptions about higher education can also work against them.

In the office of Adriana A. Urbano, a guidance counselor at Travis, the stacks of brochures promoting college often go unread. College fairs at the school are sparsely attended, with only 50 or so students showing up with their parents. That's because many Hispanics fail to understand the value of a college degree, Ms. Urbano says, especially after they make money in jobs that do not require a one, like construction or housekeeping.

At Travis, most of the students spend their cash on new clothes, cars, and gadgets rather than saving up for college, says Carlos Casas, a college-bound senior. Souped-up Hondas and Mitsubishis with snazzy paint jobs, $2,000 exhaust systems, and winglike spoilers sit in the parking lot. Students wear the latest fashions from Abercrombie & Fitch and, he says, some even bring miniature DVD players to class so they can watch movies.

Language is another barrier. Many Hispanic students who are first-generation immigrants have limited English skills. One-fifth of the students at Travis are enrolled in courses on English as a second language.

To reach out to such students, last month Travis held a college-information session for the first time entirely in Spanish. School officials invited Hispanic parents with poor English skills who rarely come to school events. The counselors tried to debunk many of the myths that the families had heard about American colleges. For instance, many Hispanics believe that they cannot go to college without a Social Security number, or if they are regarded as "undocumented aliens." Neither is true, Ms. Urbano says.

The officials even explained the basics of high school, like report cards, grades, and attendance. Many parents who speak only Spanish rely on their English-speaking children to tell them information, Ms. Urbano says, but the children sometimes get it wrong or fail to relay it altogether. School policies also change substantially as students progress from elementary to middle to high school. If a student is graded on a 1-to-5 scale in elementary school and then is scored on a percentile system in middle school, she says, parents may not know that their eighth grader's 60 percent on a test is poor.

Back at UT-Austin, Angela Rodriguez, a senior from John H. Reagan Senior High School in Houston, believes more opportunities exist now for Hispanics to succeed than ever before: Advanced Placement courses, scholarships, events like Longhorn for a Day. Hispanic students get tons of support, she says, from teachers, guidance counselors, and nonprofit groups dedicated to enrolling minorities in college. But many students just throw the opportunities away.

"Their attitude is that they don't have the money, but they're too lazy to go out and get scholarships," Ms. Rodriguez says with contempt. She knows of full scholarships at universities in North Carolina and South Carolina that have gone unused because her classmates don't want to travel to get them.

Persuading any high-school student to leave home can be a challenge, college officials say, but that may be especially true for Hispanics. Their families tend to value working and beginning a family at a young age. Parents are typically protective of their children, especially girls, so if their children want to go to college, the parents usually insist they stay close to home. Going to college is a decision the whole family makes.

Caroline L. Mintle, director of Austin's Houston admission center and one of the organizers of the bus trip, speaks from experience. Her Mexican grandmother, the family matriarch, refused to let Ms. Mintle's mother leave El Paso 35 years ago to attend UT-Austin. When Ms. Mintle chose the same university, her grandmother took it as an insult. "What was wrong with UTEP [the University of Texas at El Paso]?" Ms. Mintle remembers her grandmother grousing.

The university reassures prospective students about those concerns when they visit. When a handful of guests from the bus trip -- including three Hispanics -- tour the engineering department, Romesa B. Davis, program coordinator for Equal Opportunity in Engineering, an academic-support program, notes that it serves mostly minority students and offers free tutoring. In addition to helping out with scholarships and internships, it also plans social activities to give students a head start in making friends on campus. The university also sponsors a bus to Houston every weekend for only $25 round trip, chimes in Serges L. Lemo, an electrical-engineering student who works with Ms. Davis.

This friendly pitch, like most of the others, meets with silence. Most Hispanic students on this particular tour say virtually nothing to the professors and college students they meet. In the conference room before lunch, they sit near the front as UT students talk about life on campus. Not one of the Hispanic students asks a question, despite repeated calls from the panelists and the recruiters.

College officials in Texas remain unsure whether they need different recruiting tactics for Hispanics than they have used for blacks, who until recently have been the primary focus of minority-recruitment efforts. One attempt by UT-Austin a few years ago backfired. A promotional brochure to show the diversity of students on campus also reinforced ethnic stereotypes. In it, the only Hispanic students pictured were performing a ballet folklorico, a traditional dance in which women wear flowing skirts and men wear mariachi jackets.

"Our jaws dropped to the floor," recalls Ms. Mintle. The university had already printed 80,000 of the brochures, so that is what prospective students received.

State Efforts

In the last year, state officials have started several recruitment efforts aimed at Hispanics. They created a campaign called "College for Texans" that preaches the value of college and provides advice on what to study in high school, how to apply for college, and how to pay for it. This month the state's higher-education coordinating board is expected to choose three colleges doing well in recruiting first-generation college students to serve as examples for a new statewide program. What's more, the state has opened 42 recruiting centers, mostly in minority areas, that encourage partnerships between colleges and local high schools.

Central to those efforts is establishing personal connections in Hispanic areas, says Mike Collins, assistant to the state higher-education commissioner and the chief aide for student enrollment and graduation. "We're actually going out there and knocking on doors" of grass-roots groups and local schools, he says, by sending out Hispanic and other Spanish-speaking staff members. He says, "It is important to many minority students to see people who look like them who have gone to college and have been successful."

The state also has had a recruiting tool restored. The U.S. Supreme Court's decision last June that backed race-conscious admissions at the University of Michigan effectively overturned a 1996 federal-court decision that banned the use of race in undergraduate admissions at public colleges in Texas. As a result, colleges here now feel free again to use race as a factor not only in admissions, but in financial aid as well. After the announcement, Larry R. Faulkner, UT-Austin's president, said the university would "fairly quickly" take steps to modify its admissions policies so that they will take race into consideration for students applying to enter in fall 2004.

So far, though, it has been almost impossible to determine how successful any of the state's efforts have been in persuading more Hispanics to go to college, says David W. Gardner, assistant commissioner for planning and information resource at the higher-education coordinating board. The state's "Closing the Gaps by 2015" plan, which sets statewide goals, leaves each college to develop its own strategies. The board does not keep track of what every college does.

UT-Austin faces other challenges. Many Hispanic students do not want to come to Austin, says Augustine Garza, deputy director of admissions, because other colleges are closer and cheaper, and have a greater percentage of Hispanics.

Between 2000 and 2002, for instance, half the increase in Hispanic enrollment took place at only five public universities and seven community colleges out of 100 public institutions statewide. All of the colleges were in the southern portion of the state and in urban areas, where the majority of Hispanics live. Neither of the flagship institutions, UT-Austin or Texas A&M, was among them.

But the two institutions are making racial diversity a priority. Texas A&M has just appointed its first vice president and associate provost for assessment and institutional diversity. Mr. Faulkner regularly visits high schools that traditionally send few students to Austin. Many of those schools have large populations of minority students.

Austin's efforts have won over at least one visitor. Candy Espinoza, a senior at Douglas MacArthur High School in Houston, takes a break from the walking tour of the campus and slides off her too-tight boots. Sitting in her stocking feet, Ms. Espinoza thinks she will get in and would come. She would like to have a Hispanic roommate to make the transition to college life easier. But she worries that her family might follow through on its promise to move to Austin to be near her. Shaking her head, she says, "My dad doesn't want to let go of me."

Copyright © 2003 by The Chronicle of Higher Education