Improving student completion rates at community colleges goes hand in hand with improving educational outcomes for Latinos, Excelencia in Education President Sarita Brown said Monday at the 34th annual convention of the National Institute for Staff and Organizational Development (NISOD) in Austin, Texas.
“You can’t reach this goal without a tactical plan for Latinos,” said Brown. Founded in 2005, Excelencia is a research-based organization dedicated to improving education for the nation’s fastest-growing population. It emphasizes Latinos as an “asset” and “human capital” the nation can ill afford to ignore.
“We are a major proportion of your student body, our workforce and of this country’s civic leadership. Those are arguments that Excelencia makes every day,” said Brown during a panel titled “Examples of Excelencia: Meeting the Latino College Completion Challenge.”
The panel also included Dr. Lydia Tena, northwest campus dean and dean of instructional programs at El Paso Community College; David Pluviose, editor of Diverse: Issues in Higher Education, moderated.
Latinos are now the largest ethnic group in the country and growing, and the youngest racial and ethnic group, Brown said. Though this growth has been projected for at least 30 years, she said, educators are still coming to terms with the implications for higher education. “Demography is destiny. I don’t believe that anymore,” she said, referring to the challenges in getting educators to stop viewing Latinos as “nontraditional students” rather than as simply part of the increasingly diverse student population of the country.
Most Latino college students are first-generation, many attend colleges near home, so they can live at home and work to help pay for their education, Brown said.
Excelencia maintains a searchable database, Growing What Works, with information about Latino students and college programs with a successful track record in educating them. In addition, each year, Excelencia recognizes a college success story. El Paso Community College, one of the fastest-growing community colleges of its size in the nation, was recognized in 2011 for its early college high school initiative. The program allows students from area school districts to receive college credit while in high school and boasts an 85 percent Latino enrollment.
