Latino Graduation: The Good, the Bad, and the Possible

There was much ado last week over the announcement that the graduation rate among public high school students in the United States reached a 40-year high.  The National Council for Educational Statistics (NCES) estimates that up to 78 percent of students graduated high school within four years of starting their education, a rate not seen since 1974.  While welcomed news generally, the improvements among Hispanic and Latino students in particular caught many people’s attention.  Slightly more than 71 percent of these students graduated high school within four years of starting; representing a 10-point improvement over the past four years.  Researchers and others offered several reasons why Latino and Hispanic students’ graduation rates improved. Perhaps the most straightforward of these, and one that few even noted, is that there simply are more Hispanic and Latino students in school than at any previous point in time.

AP Photo/Reed Saxon from nationaljournal.com

The Pew Hispanic Center had reported the growth in these populations back in August 2012.  Pew’s report noted that as many as one in four public elementary school children were of Hispanic descent, while up to 24 percent of all pre-kindergarten-through-twelfth-grade students were of Hispanic descent.  The growth of the Hispanic and Latino populations in schools should not come as a surprise, of course, when one considers that these populations now represent the largest minority group in the U.S.

These upward trends are encouraging.  Unfortunately, they appear unsustainable when considering Hispanics and Latinos in higher education.  As described in Pew’s August 2012 report, Hispanic and Latino populations are the largest minority group on U.S. college campuses; representing the largest minority group at four-year colleges, and up to one-fourth of the students at two-year colleges.  While these enrollment figures parallel those for elementary and secondary schools, the graduation rates do not.  According to NCES data (summarized below), approximately 28 percent of Hispanic students graduate college within four years of starting.  The percent of students completing a traditional four-year education increases the longer students take to finish, jumping to 44 percent for students finishing in five years and to over fifty percent for those finishing in six years.

Table 1: Graduation rates for the 2004 starting cohort for select institution types

2004 Cohort	All 4-year institutions	Public Institutions	Non-profit Institutions
4-year completion rates	27.90	21.50	46.10
5-year completion rates	44.00	40.20	57.70
6-year completion rates	50.10	50.10	60.50

Source: National Council for Educational Statistic, Digest of Educational Statistics, Table 345. Available at http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d11/tables/dt11_345.asp

While improved graduation rates are a good thing, there are negative effects associated with Hispanic and Latino students taking longer to finish their schooling – increased personal debt and a delayed start to a career, to name just two examples.  The next set of challenges in the realm of Hispanic and Latino education include maintaining the improved high school graduation rates and addressing the higher education graduation rates.  This will not be an easy task, but I like to think it is not an impossible one.