Help for Part-time Students Among Recommendations Urged To Improve Latino Educational Attainment: WASHINGTON, D.C. – Warning of an education crisis for the nation’s burgeoning Latino population, academic researchers and advocates came to Capitol Hill Friday, calling for quick action to avert that crisis.
Dr. Patricia Gándara, a University of California, Los Angeles, education professor and author of the new book The Latino Education Crisis: The Consequences of Failed Social Policies, told a crowd in a Senate conference room that her objective “was to try to make clear how terribly urgent this is.”
At the conference sponsored by the American Youth Policy Forum, Gándara presented dire statistics: While Blacks and Whites have shown significant progress in college graduation rates over the past 30 years, the rates of Latinos have barely changed at all. The percentage of 25- to 29-year-old Latinos with bachelor’s degrees or higher rose to a mere 11 percent in 2005 as compared to 9 percent in 1975. The number for Blacks rose from 11 to 18 percent; for Whites, it was 24 to 34 percent over the same three decades.
Gándara said a solution is essential because Latinos, as the largest minority and the fastest-growing ethnic group in the nation, will make up one-fourth of the nation’s students by 2025.
