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Latino students:Cost of college a major concern

Financing college education is a greater challenge for Latino students than other demographic of students across the nation, according to a study released by the University of California Los Angeles.

According to the report, one in five Latino freshmen expressed major concern about the ability to pay compared with 8.6 percent of non-Latino freshmen in fall 2006.

Although 60.2 percent of Caucasian students expressed at least some concern about their ability to pay for college, a greater proportion of Latino students were more likely to express such an opinion, with Mexican-American students being the most likely to express concern.

The report also shows financial assistance was among the top factors influencing Latino freshmen in their choice of a four-year college or university.

Much of the concern comes from the income disparity between Latino households and non-Latino households, which has increased fourfold over the past three decades.

“Studies like this are very important,” said Clifton Conrad, a University of Wisconsin professor of higher education and educational leadership. “They give us a window into equal educational opportunities across gender and ethnic lines.”

At UW, financing programs and options for students are based on income and socioeconomic factors rather than race, said Susan Fischer, director of financial aid.

“Most students who are first-generation college students, or who come from low-income families, are concerned about financing college,” Fischer said. “We find this often cuts across ethnic lines. About 40 to 50 percent of the students at the university who receive financial assistance are underrepresented minorities, such as Hispanics, African Americans or Native Americans.”

To help ease concerns of Latino students, the university offers various outreach programs to help deal with language barriers that may exist between the university and parents.

“Two of the nine financial aid counselors are Spanish-speaking,” Fischer said. “We also have information available on our website and at summer orientation for parents in English, Spanish and Hmong.”

In addition to financial concerns, there is also a concern about the lack of Latino males entering four-year universities. Although the number of Latinos entering universities has increased in the past 30 years, the number of males has decreased from 57.4 percent in 1975 to 37 percent in 2006.

For Conrad, this trend is very disturbing.

“As universities, we lose, too. Since we learn a lot from the people around us, when we have fewer differences on campus, we lose different perspectives, viewpoints and life experiences,” Conrad said. “From a whole university standpoint, the learning of all students decreases as well. If we’re serious about equal educational opportunities, this is a problem.”

Other findings by the study demonstrate that Latino freshmen have a strong drive to achieve higher goals relative to non-Latino white students and were likely to report higher degree aspirations than their peers. Additionally, Latino students reported spending more time on homework or studying in high school than their non-Latino counterparts.

The national data for the study “Advancing in Higher Education: A Portrait of Latino College Freshmen in Four-Year Institutions, 1975-2006,” came from the Cooperative Institutional Research Program’s annual freshmen survey, administered by the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA’s Graduate School of Education and Information Studies.

The CIRP data were reported by gender and by specific Latino ethnic-origin groups. Findings from the report were released by the Association of American Colleges and Universities’ Diversity, Learning, and Inclusive Excellence conference in Long Beach, Calif., Thursday.