Colorado Mountain College, the first rural mountain resort region school to become a Hispanic-Serving Institution in the state, is one of few schools to have closed the graduation gap for Latino students.
As the enrollment of Hispanic and Latino students into higher education institutions hits record highs, President Joe Biden’s recent executive order could bring additional general funding and resources to several of Colorado’s Hispanic-Serving Institutions.
Hispanic-Serving Institutions are nonprofit institutions of higher learning with a full-time undergraduate student enrollment that is at least 25% Hispanic, according to Title V of the Higher Education Act. These institutions can include universities, community colleges and technical colleges.
Hispanic enrollment at postsecondary institutions rose from 1.5 million in 2000 to 3.8 million in 2019 – a record high, despite persisting economic challenges — with a dip during the pandemic.
Since 1992, over 500 higher education institutions have received the designation (roughly 10% of institutions nationwide), 15 of which are located in Colorado.
Universities earning the designation of Hispanic-Serving Institutions have been able to receive additional federal funding to support their population of students, create equitable research opportunities, improve infrastructure and much more. However, the growing number of universities earning the designation — following the historic growth of Hispanic and Latino college enrollment over the last few decades — has meant that per-student federal funding remains lower than general institutions.
Per-student federal funding at Hispanic-Serving Institutions is 25% less than at other degree-granting schools, according to the executive order. On average, most only receive 74 cents for every federal dollar that goes to general institutions annually, according to the Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities.
“Over the last 30 years, the number of HSIs has more than doubled and Hispanic or Latino student enrollment at HSIs has more than tripled,” the executive order states. “This scarcity of resources often leaves HSIs at a disadvantage when compared with better-resourced institutions.”
The executive order, published in July and backed by a Sept. 6 proclamation, established an initiative to create a board of advisors on Hispanic-Serving Institutions and increase funding to qualifying institutions. The President’s Board of Advisors on Hispanic-Serving Institutions will consist of 21 members appointed by the president who will advise him or her on advancing policy goals.
“It is the policy of my administration to advance educational equity, excellence, and economic opportunity through strong partnerships with HSIs to ensure that they have access to federal resources to help current and future generations of students succeed,” the order states.
Colorado institutions close Latino achievement and graduation gaps
Colorado has 15 institutions that qualify as Hispanic-Serving Institutions, including Colorado Mountain College, Colorado State University Pueblo, University of Northern Colorado, Adams State University and many others, according to the Colorado Department of Higher Education.
Colorado Mountain College, the first institution in Colorado’s rural mountain resort region to receive the designation in 2021, had a 27% Hispanic population (37% when including high school equivalency and English as a second language courses) in 2023. Just 10 years prior in 2013, CMC’s Latino population was approximately 13% of overall enrollments.
“The Hispanic Latino community is growing, and our mountain region is no exception to that in its driving economic force,” said Yesenia Silva-Estrada, CMC’s executive director of strategic initiatives.
CMC President Matt Gianneschi explained that the college had launched efforts to grow their Hispanic/Latino student enrollment long before their federal designation. He said that he and former CMC President Carrie Besnette Hauser, seeing the significant numbers of Hispanic and Latino students in districts at the K-12 level, wanted CMC’s enrollment to reflect its surrounding demographics.
“We hadn’t yet seen those numbers translate into college enrollments at the college,” Gianneschi said. One of CMC’s campuses is located in Leadville, where the Lake County School District’s Latino student population is close to 65%.
“One of the things that we set as an immediate priority at the time was to have our numbers of new students enrolling at the college, or those who are benefiting from what the college could offer, to be representative of the communities we serve,” he said.
Many of CMC’s efforts to support this student population have revolved around things as simple as counseling, or even “demystifying the financial process,” especially in the transition between high school and college.
Silva-Estrada explained that much of the college’s Latino student population has “intersected identities,” which can include being first-generation college students or coming from low-income backgrounds.
“We need to maybe have a much more proactive role, rather than assuming that every student is walking through the door with similar knowledge of how college works,” Gianneschi said.
The additional grant funding earned by this designation has helped to advance many of the college’s existing efforts, which Gianneschi said benefits the entire student population, not just those who are Hispanic and Latino.
“Receiving that designation actually did present some immediate opportunities to the college, even within that very first year,” Gianneschi said, referring to some of the grants CMC received in 2021.
Congressional appropriations for HSIs started out at $42.25 million in 2000, with a steep jump to just over $350.64 million in 2024. In line with his most recent executive order, the Biden Administration requested $376 million for Hispanic-Serving Institutions for the 2025 fiscal year.
“(Funding) is critical, but it is not in itself enough to change the institution,” Gianneschi said. “The federal funding is … a catalyst where we have a direction already charted where we want to go. We already have initiatives in place of things that we want to do. And when we get, say, an infusion of a half a million dollars from a new federal program that they’re creating … that just accelerates our pace of progress so we’re able to move much faster.”
Part of the funding serves to combat the disparity in achievement and graduation numbers between Hispanic students and their peers.
Approximately 35.5%% of public high school students in Colorado are Hispanic or Latino, according to data from the Colorado Department of Education. This is an increase of roughly 11,000 students compared with the 2020-21 school year.
Hispanic students in Colorado are on the lower end for graduation rates by race/ethnicity. During the 2022-23 school year, 76.1% of Hispanic students graduated high school, according to the department’s data. This number is 2.5 percentage points lower than their Black peers and roughly 12 percentage points lower than their white peers. During the same year, Hispanic students had the second-highest same drop-out rate after Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islanders.
A decade ago, graduation rates for Hispanic students at CMC were “trailing behind nearly every other group of the college at the time,” according to Gianneschi. Since achieving its Hispanic-Serving Institution designation, CMC has closed this graduation gap completely.
“As of 2023, the graduation rate for Hispanic Latino students is 31% which is basically even with the college-wide metric,” Silva-Estrada said. “It means that there’s no equity gaps in terms of graduation rate for Hispanic Latinos at CMC.”
The Biden Administration’s Sept. 6 proclamation for National Hispanic-Serving Institutions Week encourages college leaders to press for more support and recognition for their own schools and the other 500. Some colleges are hopeful that the proclamation might hint at future prioritization of federal funding for these institutions.
“We’re trying really, really hard to not just serve our students who are Latinos who decide to come to us, but (to) also make it a return on investment to our larger community,” Silva-Estrada said.
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Publish date : 2024-09-24 14:27:00
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