Why hispanics dont go to college

Get important education news and analysis delivered straight to your inbox. Latino Americans, the largest and the fastest growing ethnic minority in the United States, are half as likely to hold a college degree as non-Hispanic white adults, an education gap that has been widening since , according to a June report. Fewer than a quarter, or By comparison, more than 30 percent of black American adults had a college degree, and nearly half, or Latino education varies a lot from state to state.

In Florida, a third of Latino adults hold a college degree. The number of Latinos with college degrees is rapidly growing in Florida and the Latino-white gap is one of the smallest at 10 percentage points. However, Florida has large Cuban and Puerto Rican populations, many of whom come from well-educated families. Roughly 40 percent of Cuban Americans and 30 percent of Puerto Ricans have college degrees. By contrast, only 17 percent of Mexican Americans have college degrees, with many Mexicans emigrating from poor, uneducated regions in Mexico.

Related: Most immigrants outpace Americans when it comes to education — with one big exception. However, the gap between Latinos and whites remains stubbornly high at 29 percentage points. The reasons why Latinos are struggling to obtain a college education are complex.

Nichols pointed out that Latinos are more likely to opt for community colleges and for-profit colleges, where graduation rates are lower. Many are the first in their families to attempt a degree. Reports like this one are a helpful first step in identifying the most difficult obstacles. The next step at The Education Trust is to count how many Latinos ever enrolled in college in each state so that we can better understand how much of these low college numbers are due to college dropouts versus those who never attempt college.

The solutions will be different depending on the answers. This is because, despite growing college enrollment, young Hispanics are not as likely to go to college as some other groups.

And among those who do, Hispanics are more likely than others to attend community colleges, which generally have lower tuition than four-year schools. Note: This post was originally published on May 26, and has been updated to reflect new data.

Say "Alexa, enable the Pew Research Center flash briefing". It organizes the public into nine distinct groups, based on an analysis of their attitudes and values. Even in a polarized era, the survey reveals deep divisions in both partisan coalitions. Use this tool to compare the groups on some key topics and their demographics.

Pew Research Center now uses as the last birth year for Millennials in our work. President Michael Dimock explains why. The relationship he was in soured and he found himself obsessed with figuring out how to salvage it. After he enrolled at Northeastern Illinois University, he participated in a university support program, Proyecto Pa'Lante , geared toward Latino students like him who needed help learning the basics of academic life, like which classes count toward degrees.

But the program was only for the first two years of school. After that, Casimiro was on his own. A few days after grades were posted in , Casimiro and his mother sat down with an administrator at Northeastern Illinois.

They agreed he would drop out rather than pay for another semester he could barely afford. Pushed by their parents and educators, more Hispanics than ever are attending college in the hopes of securing their place in the U. As they navigate challenges such as the bureaucracy of higher education and paying tuition in an environment where so few teachers, administrators and students look like them, many Latino students say they are worried higher education institutions are happily taking their money without making sure their specific needs are being met.

The number of Hispanic students enrolled in college rose from 3. Meanwhile, college enrollment overall has been on the decline for years. According to the National Student Clearinghouse, there were Earlier in , enrollment had dropped to It used to be that colleges had a large pool of students to draw from. But neglecting Hispanic students is bad business these days, she said. Latino students often hail from different backgrounds compared with other students.

Meanwhile, about 2 in 3 white students come from the top half of earners. Nearly half of Latino students are the first in their family to go to college, according to data analyzed by Excelencia. And just under half of them were eligible for federal Pell Grants, money only given to those with a high financial need. In contrast, just 1 in 5 white students was first-generation, and about 1 in 3 qualified for Pell Grant money. Hurtado, a Chicago native, said she wants to become a broadcast journalist.

On a recent night, long after her classes, Hurtado sat in the computer lab, her eyes half-closed from lack of sleep, stitching footage of herself covering random news on campus, like the recent student protests of a talk given by Sean Spicer , the former spokesman for the White House. She gets her homework done in between her job working as a teaching assistant. It had been a particularly exhausting Wednesday. Hurtado had spent the earlier part of the day in a government office trying to navigate the bureaucratic labyrinth to help her husband secure his legalization paperwork.

He was one of the receipts of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals DACA , an Obama-era program that offered immunity for two-year periods to immigrant children brought to the country without documentation. The screen glared on her face. Northeastern Illinois is the third college Hurtado has attended in the past five years.

In , she was initially lured to Columbia College Chicago by promises of a diverse student body, but when she got there she found she was often the only Latino person in her class. The other students also had parents who worked in the media industry, so they were more familiar with the field.

The professors, many of them white, seemed to focus on other students and made her feel small. At colleges across the U. For Hurtado, more troubling than being excluded culturally was how much the college cost.

Her father had urged her to go to college and even offered to pay her way. But neither she nor her dad realized how much it would cost.

That was a half-decade ago. Hurtado said she wishes she had known to save money while in high school to help pay for school. She said she feels behind now since she is still a few semesters away from graduation. After dropping out of Columbia, Hurtado went to a community college briefly before transferring to Northeastern Illinois in the fall semester. She said she feels more at home on this campus, where plenty of students look like her, and she gets to report on issues that affect the Latino community in her classes.