Hispanic College Attendance

As a college degree has become an essential part in getting a job in recent years there has been a substantial increase in college attendance. In 2002, when the Pew Hispanic Center did research they found that 59% of all U.S. workers had at least some college education, because a high school diploma no longer serves as the basic credential for successful employment in the U.S. economy. With the need of higher education becoming more important than ever, the percentage of Hispanic students attending college rose from 9.9 to 15.8 percent between the years of 2000 and 2013. Although the increase is quite substantial what causes the Hispanic college attendance to be so much lower than many other ethnicities, as well as when they do attend college

Within that same period of time the number of bachelor degrees awarded increased by 90% for Hispanics. Although these rates are higher than ever before, Hispanics continue to be very underrepresented among both undergraduates and bachelor’s degree recipients, with rates of 8% and 4.2% respectively. The President’s Advisor Commission said “Less than half of all Hispanic high school students in this country are currently qualified to enroll in a four-year institution. Of those only about 30%-40% of those enroll in college following their completion of high school. In 1996 the Hispanic Scholarship Fund, the nation’s largest scholarship granting organization for Latinos, adopted a new mission to double the rate of Hispanics earning a college degree. They did this with the hope that providing more money for them to attend school would cut down on the likeliness of them dropping out at some point before earning a college

Although this may be true there are a few reasons for this. First and foremost, their lack of higher education causes them to have to work the lower end jobs because they do lack the college degree. Research done in 2006 by the National Research Council found that presently Hispanics are paid comparably to Whites given that they have the same education. When I asked Liddy what she thought the importance of education was in her culture she said “Education is very important in my culture for success, without a college degree we are forced into working lower level jobs like working in agriculture.” This may substantially more apparent in the Hispanic culture, but without a formal education just about everyone has the same chances of working those lower end jobs, the Hispanics just seem to dominate in these areas and they work very hard at the jobs that they are