Each year when we do our Top 100 undergraduate degree producers, we get calls from Hispanic-serving institutions asking why they didn’t make the list. Out of the Top 100 schools that confer the most bachelor’s degrees to Hispanics in 2005-06, just 33 percent were HSIs. According to Excelencia in Education’s analysis of the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), in 2005-2006, some 252 institutions met the basic criterion for an HSI. Out of these 252 institutions, roughly 50 percent (125 institutions) were four-year institutions (54 were public and 71 were private institutions). The other 50 percent (127 institutions) were two-year.
Hispanic-serving institutions are defined not by their institutional mission, but by their total Hispanic enrollment. “HSIs are public and private not-for-profit degree-granting institutions of higher education with 25 percent or more undergraduate full-time equivalent Hispanic enrollment,” according to Excelencia in Education.
So why don’t more HSIs make the top 100 list? Eliminating the community colleges brings us down to 125 schools. In our Top 100 analysis, we usually exclude schools in Puerto Rico so that they don’t dominate the list, skewing the results and making it difficult to see how other schools are doing when it comes to graduating their Hispanic students. Out of the 125 institutions, 45 are in Puerto Rico. Most HSIs don’t make the Top 100 list simply because their enrollment is much smaller than the schools that do make the list.
