The College Board Advocacy and Policy Center recently published the College Completion Agenda 2011 Progress Report, a troubling showcase of poor minority graduation and retention rates and the center’s comprehensive plan to improve the statistics.
The College Board Advocacy and Policy Center recently published the College Completion Agenda 2011 Progress Report, a troubling showcase of poor minority graduation and retention rates and the center’s comprehensive plan to improve the statistics.
According to the report, just 19.2 percent of Hispanics between the ages of 25 and 34 hold at least a two-year associate’s degree. The center’s goal is to increase that number to 55 percent of 25- to 34-year-old Latinos by 2025. In order to achieve that result, the country must dramatically increase college completion rates.
According to the report, Oregon’s six-year graduation rate for Hispanic bachelor’s degree–seeking students at four-year colleges is 47 percent, just behind California, the state with the highest population of Latinos. The state with the highest graduation rate is Florida, at 56 percent.
At PSU, the numbers may be trending in a positive direction, as Latinos are filling more and more seats in our classrooms. In 2001, PSU had just 46 Hispanic full-time freshmen; 10 years later, that number has climbed to 133. Portland State’s 2011 freshmen class is 12 percent Latino; the 2011 transfer student class is just 9 percent Latino.
However, retention may be a problem. While the percentage of Hispanic full-time freshmen in 2001 who continued to their second year was 71 percent, that number fell to 55 percent in 2002.
In the fall of 2009, Portland State President Wim Wiewel commissioned a task force to help improve the success of Latino students. The result of the task force was the ¡Exito! program—Spanish for “success.” This year, the program’s initiatives include increased student financial support, the new Casa Latina support center and new recruitment and advising programs. ¡Exito! has also set a target to double the number of Latino faculty
and staff at PSU.
Jilma Meneses, the chief diversity officer at PSU, believes that the apparent increase of Latinos at PSU is very real. “The Latino community feels the best way for their community to cycle out of poverty and to contribute to the global economy is to encourage their youth to pursue higher education,” Meneses said. “Many students cannot afford to go out of state or to attend private colleges. Their success can be enhanced if the university community is welcoming and inclusive of Latinos.”
Retention is a major component of any successful increase in students’ long-term graduation rates, and PSU has been implementing programs like ¡Exito! to help improve those numbers overall, according to Dan Formiller, associate vice president for Student Affairs, Academic and Career Services. Formiller has been working at PSU for 26 years, and is currently involved with centers focusing on the university’s advising initiative.
“Last year, Provost [and Vice President for Academic Affairs] Roy Koch made an investment of $1 million to enhance advising at PSU,” Formiller said. “This enabled us to hire 14 additional professional advisers. The added capacity has allowed us to require that all new students attend a new student orientation prior to their first term, and that all new first-year freshmen receive advising in their first year in order to register for their second year.”
Portland State has also launched the Degree Mapping and Milestone project, which charts every major available at PSU as a four-year degree so that students can visualize their academic program, Formiller said.
The 2009 retention rates are PSU’s best, lending credit to the initiatives put in place. That year, 76 percent of Portland State freshmen returned for their second year; nationally, the freshmen retention rate was 78 percent.
