By Magaly Muñoz
Post Staff

In honor of Hispanic Heritage Month, California Senator Alex Padilla introduced legislation initiatives to expand opportunities for Latino students in higher education and highlight Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSI).

The first part of the bipartisan legislation is being supported by Senators John Cornyn (R-Texas) and Bob Menendez (D-N.J) to establish the week of September 11th as National Hispanic-Serving Institutions Week, according to a press release from Padilla’s office.

Hispanic Serving Institutions make up about 23% of all colleges in California with another 47 emerging institutions. Colleges have to have 25% of their population be Latino or Hispanic students to be considered an HSI.

The second part of Padilla’s legislation, co-led in the House of Representatives by Representatives Joaquin Castro (D-Texas-20) and Jenniffer González-Colón (R-Puerto Rico), is the Hispanic Educational Resources and Empowerment (HERE) Act that looks to give resources to Latino students to bridge the educational gap.

Twenty-eight percent of Latinos have an associate’s degree or higher compared to that of their white counterparts with 48%. At two-year institutions, Hispanics’ graduation rate was five percentage points lower than that of their white, non-Hispanic peers and at four-year institutions, Hispanics’ graduation rate was 13 percentage points lower than that of their white, non-Hispanic peers, according to Exelencia in Education.

Padilla said the grants are tailored to help students through the application and transition process for college. The grants would also be put toward non-academic needs that deter students from achieving success in higher education.

“Our current education system has failed to sufficiently support Latino college recruitment and retention – just 28% of Latino adults have an associate’s degree or higher,” Padilla said in an email to The Post. “My legislation invests in both the educational and economic success of the next generation of Latinos in the workforce by creating a new federal grant program to fund partnerships between Hispanic-Serving Institutions and school districts with significant Hispanic and Latino enrollment to improve college readiness and completion.”

Some universities in California are already making changes to reflect the focuses that the HERE Act is looking to make.

San Francisco State University has a 36% population of Hispanic students enrolled in the school and initiatives are being made by leadership to help foster success for them.

SFSU President Lynn Mahoney said coming back to post-pandemic, in-person instruction in 2021 made her reflect on what more the university could be doing. She said being an HSI shouldn’t just be because of the chance of demographics, it should come with intention, and the campus should reflect the students’ needs.

“We recognize that students need to have faculty, staff and administrators that reflect their own ethnic and racial backgrounds. And this has not been easy in some cases. The pipeline is small,” Mahoney said.

Latinos makeup only 16% of staff and administration, and 9% of faculty, according to Robert King, the director of Communications at SFSU. Mahoney said STEM-related majors are where they’re lacking the most Latino and Hispanic representation.

Mahoney said some of the programs they have on campus are the Latino Student Success Center. Established in 2022, Spanish language orientations and a Center for Equity and Excellence in Teaching and Learning welcome educators to learn how to become culturally competent in their teachings when they have such a diverse class makeup.

“The future of California is our first-generation students of color, and Latinx students are the fastest-growing population here,” Mahoney said. “This state will only continue to be the best place in the world, if, in fact, we get college degrees into the hands of our Latinx students. So this is an investment that the state and every single citizen has to make.”

PIQE, or Parent Institute for Quality Education, is an organization that works primarily with high school students and parents, but has programs that address major gaps in education like STEM and offer transitional tools to help with higher education.

Andrew Ferson, the director of Policy and Partnerships at PIQE, said their “Family Bridge to College” looks to address what they call the “summer melt.”

“Summer melt is this idea that you have students who are accepted into and then intending to enroll in higher education, but then in the summer, for whatever reason they basically stopped going to or ended up not going to college,” Ferson said.

He said the program works with the districts and colleges to bring in families during the summer to foster the relationships early on and keep students on track with what they need for higher education. They’ve also partnered with UC San Diego to bring in professors and counselors to familiarize parents and students with resources and tools that the university offers.

Ferson said although they work primarily with high school families, a lot of the needs that parents are worried about – like digital divide and financing– can also be seen in college family concerns. He added that legislation, like what Padilla is introducing, is “smart policy” and addresses the relationship that colleges should have with families.

“I certainly hope that that bill gets passed and funded,” Ferson said. “But in the meantime, it’s on all of us to be actively reaching out to families and forming those relationships and meeting them where they’re at so that all of our students can succeed.”

Magaly Muñoz

A graduate of Sacramento State University, Magaly Muñoz’s journalism experience includes working for the State Hornet, the university’s student-run newspaper and conducting research and producing projects for “All Things Considered” at National Public Radio. She also was a community reporter for El Timpano, serving Latino and Mayan communities, and contributed to the Sacramento Observer, the area’s African American newspaper.

Muñoz is one of 40 early career journalists who are part of the California Local News Fellowship program, a state-funded initiative designed to strengthen local news reporting in California, with a focus on underserved communities.

The fellowship program places journalism fellows throughout the state in two-year, full-time reporting positions.

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