Poor info on financial aid hindering Hispanic students
Monday, May 3, 2004 7:56 AM PDT
By Associated Press
Printable version
E-mail this articleBERKELEY, Calif. -- Scant awareness of financial aid is creating a barrier between Hispanics and college, according to a new report.
"Their expectation is that college is too expensive and out of reach for them," said Harry Pachon, president of the Tomas Rivera Policy Institute at the University of Southern California, which conducted the research.
The result, he said, is that potential students are stranded on a "paper frontier," daunted by the sometimes confusing forms required to get student loans and grants.
Three out of four Hispanic young adults surveyed who weren't in college said they would have been more likely to go if they'd known more about financial aid.
The survey was conducted for The Sallie Mae Fund, a charitable organization funded by Sallie Mae, the nation's largest provider of student loans. Responding to the findings, fund officials said they will expand existing programs aimed at raising awareness about financial aid in the Hispanic community.
Among other things, the fund is hosting 40 of its 135 "Paying for College" workshops in Spanish this year and will launch a 20-city bus tour targeting major Latino population centers.
The report was based on a telephone survey of 1,200 Hispanic parents of children age 18-24 and a separate sample of 1,200 Hispanic adults age 18-24. Survey respondents were drawn from seven major metropolitan areas across the nation and the survey had a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.
Key results included findings that:
--More than two-thirds of parents surveyed said they didn't receive financial aid information while their children were in grades K-12. More than half of young adults surveyed who weren't in college said they had not received financial aid information in K-12.
--More than two-thirds of young adults who were in college were at least familiar with some financial aid options, compared to only half of young adults not in college.
--Nearly 65 percent of Hispanic families preferred to learn about financial aid through face-to-face meetings, rather than the Internet or printed material.
--About half of Hispanic parents preferred to learn about financial aid in Spanish while more than half of young adults preferred English.
Historically, Hispanic enrollment in higher education rates has lagged behind the national average, said Tom Joyce, spokesman for The Sallie Mae Fund. An estimated 10 percent of Hispanics have a college degree today compared to a national average of about 30 percent, he said.
In California, Hispanics make up about one-third of the population, and about 16 percent of enrollment at the University of California. More than 20 percent of students at the California State University system are Hispanic.
UC sends out bilingual pamphlets on financial aid to Hispanic families and is engaged in a number of outreach programs involving direct contact with prospective students and their parents, said UC spokeswoman Lavonne Luquis.
"Unfortunately, those programs are in peril right now because of the fact that the governor proposed zeroing out all of their funding," she said.
With census data showing that about 1 in 6 U.S. children is Hispanic, improving access to college is a matter of good business sense as well as the right thing to do, said U.S. Rep. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., who discussed the new report's findings in a teleconference Wednesday.
"The nation's competitive future, the nation's educational future will increasingly depend upon our community," he said.
The report was no surprise to Menendez, who recalled being accepted to Ivy League schools when he graduated high school -- and simply assuming that they were too expensive to consider.
"I made career decisions based upon a lack of information," he said. "If my parents and I had better access to financial aid information I would have had a world of different options at my fingertips."
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