Latino Access to Higher Education: Ethnic Realities and New Directions for the Twenty-First Century

Citation

Guerrero, L. (2016), "Latino Access to Higher Education: Ethnic Realities and New Directions for the Twenty-First Century", Equality, Diversity and Inclusion, Vol. 35 No. 7/8, pp. 476-479. https://doi.org/10.1108/EDI-04-2016-0028

Latino Access to Higher Education presents a different way of thinking about diversity and inclusion. This book considers various aspects that are often not explored by management scholars, such as the history of exclusion, the legal framework that supports exclusion and segregation and other aspects of the context that Latinos and other minorities face when they want to access higher education. This book seeks to investigate the problems and challenges in accessing higher education for Latino students, specifically for first-generation Latinos. The book had 12 ambitious objectives: to examine various aspects of the educational experiences of first-generation Latino students, to analyze historical and legal cases that impact the educational experiences of Mexican-Americans, the largest group of Latinos in the USA, to review the research literature about Latinos in higher education, to consider a holistic depiction of education in the USA, to report results from a qualitative study about Latino students in Texas, to outline indicators of historically entrenched racial ideologies in American education, to propose potential solutions to historical and contemporary barriers to higher education for Latinos, to propose a framework of empowerment for Latino students, to provide information that various stakeholders, including students, faculty, administrators, may use to establish a balanced educational system, to petition that institutions of higher education be held accountable for not providing equal access and support to Latino students, specifically along the Texas-Mexico border, to show “how ‘revolutionizing’ education in the midst of globalization will be the challenge of our times,” and to explore what the future of Latinos in higher education may hold. Given the number of objectives, it should not be surprising that this book was better at achieving some objectives than others. I personally felt that the book was better at explaining the history and context of barriers to higher education for Latinos in the USA than some of the other objectives advanced, such as the empirical section or the proposal of a framework for the empowerment of Latino students. One issue with this book is that the title suggests that it is about Latinos, but most of the focus is on Mexican-Americans living along the US-Mexico border. While it may be true that Mexican-Americans are the majority of Latinos in the USA and many Latinos live near the US-Mexico border, it does not seem proper to generalize the history, legal battles, and experiences of Mexican-Americans living along the Texas-Mexico border to the rest of the Latinos living in the USA.

Although not defined in the book, generally the term first generation is used to refer to immigrants who are foreign-born because these immigrants are the first generation to live in the USA. Other times, however, the book refers to first-generation Latino college students, which may mean that they are the first generation to attend college in their family or that they are first-generation immigrants who attended college. The context seems to suggest that it referred to students who were the first to attend college in their families. The book would have benefitted from clearly defining these and several other terms, such as access, empowerment, balanced educational system, and globalization. Clearly defining terms is especially important given that the audience for this book is likely to include students, teachers, administrators, researchers, policy makers, and others.

A major strength of this book is that it sets the context for the educational experiences of Mexican-Americans along the Texas-Mexico border in detail. It sets the stage with statistics about the growth of the Latino population in the USA, the percentage of Latinos who were enrolled in school across different age groups, the aspirations for higher education among Hispanics, and so forth. The book examines, in considerable detail, the efforts by the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF) to desegregate public schools in Texas and California and, ultimately, to provide a more equitable funding model for public schools in Texas.

The literature review includes the antecedents to success and experiences in higher education for first-generation college students, the reasons why first-generation Latino students may choose to go to community college before transferring to a four-year university, the gaps between minority and white students in terms of performance in standardized tests and graduation rates, and the challenges faced by Latinos when trying to fit in due to differences in culture and social class.

The empirical section of the book was the qualitative analysis of interviews. The sample consisted of nine Mexican-American students and one Anglo student attending Sul Ross State University, which is where both authors work. Sul Ross State University has several campuses located along the US-Mexico border. The study’s framework focused on Latino students having barriers due to being first-generation college students who lacked social and cultural capital (including lacking knowledge about middle-class social norms). The design of this study was a limitation of the book. The sample was small and not representative of Latinos throughout the USA. I felt that the interviews did not give the reader information about the lack of social and cultural capital, which were key aspects of the theoretical framework that the authors used. I had hoped to learn what cultural norms students had to learn in order to fit in with the college culture and the extent to which this process of acquiring the knowledge and enacting the behaviors was difficult for them. After reading about the inequities in the Texas public school system in detail, I also hoped that the interviews would address the extent to which students were academically prepared for college. Unfortunately, the interviews were mostly focused on difficulties navigating the administrative aspects of university, such as registration and financial aid. In general, I did not find the literature review and conceptual development to be as related to the data collection and to the results as I had expected.

The authors make recommendations to several stakeholders. For national-level policy makers, they advocate for incentives to ensure a smooth transition from secondary to post-secondary educational institutions, for a need to graduate 90 percent of first-generation Latino college students, and for financial assistance for first-generation Latino college students with high GPAs. It was not clear to me what a smooth transition would entail or why 90 percent was a desirable graduation rate, however. At the state level, they recommend funding higher education institutions to reward increases in enrollment of first-generation Latino college students in what they call high quality programs (such as STEM), implementing equitable accountability measures, implementing accountability measures for long-distance equipment utilization, and implementing the state’s plan to recruit, retain, and graduate first-generation students that reflect the demographics of the population of the state of Texas. I felt that it needed further explanation on how increasing enrollment would be beneficial to Latino students since the argument was made that Latino students may not be prepared for college after high school graduation. It would seem to me that having unprepared students entering college would serve to frustrate both the instructors and the students. The authors may have implied that there may be a way to address the gap in their preparation, but this was not made explicit. It was not clear to me what the accountability measures would be or how they would be helpful. Several recommendations are also made for high schools, community colleges, and educators in institutions of higher education.

In my opinion, one of the most valuable chapters for management scholars is Chapter 7, which explains institutional racism as it relates to education. I think that this chapter would be of particular interest to readers of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion: An International Journal because behavioral researchers have tended to focus on individual-level attitudes and behaviors such as prejudice but institutional racism has been less studied in business and management. Generally, this chapter explains the extent to which the belief in white superiority is widespread across the USA and the impact of this belief on education. This chapter also presents many examples of institutional racism and racial microaggressions in educational settings. A common microagression faced by students is to be told that they are the “good kind of Mexicans,” for example. The implication being, of course, that most Mexicans are not the good kind. An example of racist beliefs is when in a staff meeting in a public school, someone proposes that the solution to the achievement gap is to recruit more Asian students. The implication here being that some ethnicities are smarter than others and that nothing can be done to improve the education of Mexican-American students.

The book concludes that what is needed to establish a “balanced educational system” is to “close historical gaps, like existing gaps between teachers’ and students’ social and cultural stratifications, institute a transparent, relevant, and culturally sensitive transfer process along the educational continuum, identify and provide appropriate and equitable resources, implement an effective mechanism for monitoring and assessment, adopt an evaluation system based on final outcomes (e.g. graduation rates), and incorporate an accountability element to ensure transparency, equity, continuity, and positive final outcomes” (p. 201). I would have liked to see a more detailed explanation about what exactly is proposed, how the recommendations should be implemented, and how they would be helpful to first-generation Latino college students.

In addition to the problem with generalizing from Mexican-Americans to all Latinos in the USA, I felt that a limitation of the book was the switching back and forth between focusing on Latinos throughout the USA and then focusing on Mexican-Americans living near the Texas-Mexico border. In general, the book was not focused on just one aspect of access to higher education. In fact, some parts of the book were concerned about access to public education. Perhaps, this was related to the authors’ objective to look at education from a holistic point of view. If that is the case, then there could have been a greater effort to integrate and connect the different aspects of history, legal battles, public education, post-secondary education, hiring practices in universities, student interviews about problems with administration in university, and so forth.

Overall, I think this book is both valuable and interesting for the readers of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion. This book is likely to be useful for those who would like to understand the history of Latinos, especially Mexican-Americans, in the USA and the history of legal battles regarding access to public and higher education institutions for Mexican-Americans. The book’s audience is likely to include researchers, teachers, administrators, and students. With 264 pages for $43.95, this book is a good value for those interested in Latino Studies, and diversity and inclusion.