Hispanic graduation rates: What is your campus doing?

The San Antonio Express-News' story, "Hispanic college degrees getting a push: Group focuses on Latinos starting but not finishing" described a partnership between State Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-San Antonio, and Exelencia in Education, created to begin working towards raising the percentage of Latinos completing a college degree.

The initiative is called Ensuring America's Future, and I applaud the work of Exelencia in Education and its co-founder and president, Sarita Brown.  As a Latina, the issues involving the Hispanic culture and higher education are ones that I am passionate about.

As I read the article, I couldn't help but wonder how colleges and universities are tackling their Latino retention rates.   When I worked in undergrad enrollment, the university I worked for wanted to increase their Latino enrollment.  As I began researching and developing strategies for recruiting Latino students, I quickly realized that the university did not have the resources available to retain them.  However, the university did begin making small steps towards achieving even the smallest of initiatives, such as hiring more Spanish-speaking staff.

"Rising to the Challenge: Hispanic College Graduation Rates as a National Priority" provides a lot of data and tables regarding this topic.  During the study, the authors interviewed eight administrators: four schools with higher than average Hispanic graduation rates, and four with lower rates.

The study was an interesting read - and I was shocked at what some of the administrators said about their successes and/or failures in the graduation rates of Hispanics on their campuses. One mentioned that their white students arrived to their campus better prepared academically than the minority students somehow blaming the minority students for their inability to graduate.

Here are some real solutions:

• build a sense of community among Latino students, faculty and staff
• include the family - invite them to campus. 
• ask your Latino graduates what helped them succeed and how they can "pay it forward" to the current students
• Latino family visit dates

Almost half of school children in the state of Texas are Latino.  Colleges and universities need to be a part of the conversation, and begin to understand what needs to be done to help Latino students enroll in college, and to persist through to graduation.  What will it take? What has your institution done recently that has improved retention on your campus?

@HigherEdGirl

Coaches as Worthy Retention Officers?

I found a great post in the NY Times blog, The Choice, written by Lionel Anderson, who is an academic advisor at Temple University.  His post, "Now That You've Gotten In", gives 6 tips to incoming freshman about how to survive their first year.

My favorite tip given was to visit the Career Center as a freshman.  Making that connection early on is such a great piece of advice, and thought it was worthy to point out.

After reading Lionel's post, I realized that the years I spent coaching college volleyball was so instrumental in nurturing my love for higher education and enrollment planning.  As I read the 6 tips offered in Lionel's post, I quickly realized that I had communicated those same principles to my incoming freshman, but without any guidance from the retention officer at my institution.

Does your institution train or include the coaching staff in retention planning on campus?  Is the coaching staff at your institution included in any conversations regarding enrollment management services (recruitment, admissions, retention, marketing)?

Declaration: After 10 years, I'm still a higher ed novice

I have 21 month old twins, and my son jumped into the kiddie pool today head first without an ounce of fear - and loved every second of it.  He went back for seconds, thirds and fourths! I'm going to do the same thing - with a blog.  So here goes nothing.

If you know me, you know that I love my job as an enrollment manager. You also know that I have a master's degree in enrollment management, and that I read article after article about higher ed.    Sometimes I feel like I can't keep up with the ever-changing landscape of higher education, and twitter doesn't seem to help that feeling.  Every second that goes by, my news feed is filled with links to higher ed articles.  After 10 years in this business, I still feel like a rookie.

Then I read @TimNekritz's blog post, "no gurus: we are all social media students".  In his post he writes about how social media is constantly changing and that there are no experts.

There are no experts.

Those four words jumped off of the computer screen at me.  I've been wanting to start a blog as a place to begin networking with other higher ed/enrollment professionals, but was too afraid.  After all, I'm no enrollment expert, right?

So, today, I am declaring myself a higher ed novice.  After 10 years in the business, I am still learning.  Yes, I definitely have opinions about the future of higher education and not everyone will agree with them, but some will! I look forward to networking and getting to know others through this blogging journey.

I've survived jumping in head first into the pool of blog-land! I kinda liked it.  I think I'll go back for seconds, thirds, fourths, ...

@HigherEdGirl