Reaching Out to Hispanic Students May Be Key for Some Colleges’ Survival - Higher Education: ...HSIs are two- or four-year nonprofit degree granting institutions that have an enrollment of at least 25 percent Hispanic.
Notre Dame de Namur’s Hispanic enrollment hovered around 17 percent in 2007. Today, Hispanic enrollment is 29 percent, according to a college spokesman. And that’s not all that’s grown. The college’s enrollment rose to slightly more than 2,000 in the fall of 2012.
“We have grown about 35 percent in the last five years,” says Hernan Bucheli, the college’s vice president for external affairs. “We’ve been growing pretty consistently and, for our scale, pretty significantly. The Hispanic serving strategy has played a big role in that.”
College officials and higher education experts say reaching out to Hispanic students is critical to the future of the college.
“Higher education is changing, and demographics are changing,” says Dr. Judith Greig, president of Notre Dame de Namur. “The ground is just shifting. I think institutions that don’t have some kind of edge or some kind of niche are not going to survive these changes, particularly institutions that aren’t wealthy. Those of us who are not sitting with huge endowments will have to figure out another way to make it through.”
