RIVER FOREST, Ill. — When she began to check out colleges as a high school student, Jacqueline Quintero noticed something many seemed to have in common.
"I don't like saying it, but they all looked so white," said Quintero, whose parents came to the United States from Mexico. "I just didn't feel a sense of belonging."
Then she went to a reception for admitted students at Dominican University, near where she grew up in the west Chicago suburbs. Among the things that made her decide almost immediately to go there: Information was provided to families in English and Spanish.
"My parents finally got to ask questions" in their native language, said Quintero, who's now a junior on track for law school. "I was used to translating for them my whole life. I literally cried."
This seemingly small accommodation is one of many that have helped boost Dominican's enrollment by nearly 25 percent since 2021, a period during which comparable institutions have struggled to attract students, and as the number of 18-year-olds is about to begin a long decline.
That's because the university has tapped into one group of prospective customers that's growing: Hispanic high school graduates such as Quintero.
Universities and colleges have historically not done well at enrolling Hispanic students, who lag behind their white peers in college attendance. Now their own success may largely depend on it.
"The demographics in our country are changing, and higher education has to adapt," said Glena Temple, Dominican's president.
Or, as Quintero put it, smiling: "Now they need us."
A growing pool of potential students
Nearly 1 in 3 students in grades K through 12 is Hispanic, the National Center for Education Statistics reports. That's up from fewer than 1 in 4 a decade ago. The proportion of students in public schools who are Hispanic is even higher in some states, including California, Texas and Florida.
By 2041, the numbers of white, Black and Asian high school graduates are projected to fall (by 26 percent, 22 percent and 10 percent, respectively), according to the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education, which tracks this. Over that same period, the number of Hispanic graduates is expected to grow by 16 percent.
That makes these young people — often the children or grandchildren of immigrants, or immigrants themselves — newly important to colleges and universities.
Yet at a time when higher education needs these students, the proportion of Hispanic high school graduates heading directly to college is lower than for white students, and falling. The number dropped from 70 percent to 58 percent from 2012 to 2022, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Hispanic students who do enroll in college also drop out at higher rates.
In the past, colleges and universities "could hit their [enrollment] numbers without engaging this population," said Deborah Santiago, chief executive officer of the Latino advocacy organization Excelencia in Education. "That's no longer the case."
A possible solution to looming worker shortfalls
A good example of the potential for recruiting Hispanic students is in the Kansas City metropolitan area, which includes communities in Missouri and Kansas. The largest school district in the region, Kansas City, Mo., is now 58 percent Hispanic.
Getting at least some of these students to enroll in college "is what we need to be preparing for as higher education institutions, and to meet the needs of our communities," said Greg Mosier, president of Kansas City Kansas Community College, which has begun advertising in Spanish-language newspapers and on Spanish-language radio.
Responding to these changing demographics is about more than colleges filling seats, experts say. It will have an impact on the national economy.
About 43 percent of all jobs will require at least bachelor's degrees by 2031, the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce estimates. The projected decline in the number of college graduates over that period, researchers say, could create serious labor shortages.
In this gloomy scenario, helping get more Hispanic Americans on a path to higher-paying jobs seems an obvious solution.
Accomplishing that goal, however, is challenging, and many educators fear the Trump administration's attacks on diversity programs could make recruiting and supporting these students even harder. Officials at many institutions contacted about this didn't want to talk about the topic.
Among the other challenges: Median annual household income for Hispanic families is more than 25 percent lower than for white families, the Census Bureau says, meaning that college may seem out of reach. Many Hispanic students attend public high schools with few college counselors.
And 73 percent of Hispanic undergraduates are the first in their families to go to college, more than for any other group, according to NASPA, an association of student affairs administrators.
These factors can combine to push Latino young people straight from high school into the workforce. Of those who do go to college, many work at least part time while they learn, something research finds reduces the likelihood of graduating.
When Eddie Rivera graduated from high school in North Carolina a decade ago, "college wasn't really an option. My counselor wasn't there for me. I just followed what my Hispanic culture tells us, which is to go to work."
Rivera, who has DACA status, or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, worked at a retirement home, an indoor trampoline park and a hospital during the pandemic, where colleagues encouraged him to go to college. With help from a scholarship program for undocumented students, he ended up at Dominican.
Now, at 28, he's a junior majoring in international relations and diplomacy. He plans to get a master's degree in foreign policy and national security.
Going the extra mile to welcome Latino students
A small Catholic university that dates back to 1922, Dominican has a history of educating the children of immigrants — in earlier times those of northern and central European origin.
Today, banners with photos of successful Hispanic alumni hang from lampposts on the 30-acre campus, and a mariachi band leads celebrations on Día de los Muertos.
Tours are held in English and Spanish, students are offered on-campus jobs, and staffers help entire families through health care, housing and financial crises. In the fall, Dominican added a satellite campus in Chicago's largely Mexican American Pilsen neighborhood, providing job-oriented two-year associate degrees. Every student at the university gets financial aid, federal data shows.
"On a daily basis I run into a staff member or professor asking me what's going on with my life and how they can support me," said Aldo Cervantes, a junior business major with a minor in accounting who hopes to go into banking or human resources.
There's a Family Academy for the parents, grandparents, siblings and cousins of students to learn about university resources. As an incentive, families that come to five sessions get credit for their student to take a summer course at no cost.
"When we take a look at the Latine population going to college, it's not about an individual choice," said Gabe Lara, vice president of student success and engagement, using the university's preferred term for people of Latin American descent. "It's a family choice."
These and other measures have helped to more than double the proportion of Hispanic students here over the last 10 years, to nearly 70 percent of the 2,570 undergraduates, according to figures provided by the university.
As other universities start trying to recruit Hispanic students, "they ask us all the time how we were able to achieve this," said Temple, Dominican's president. "What they don't like to hear is, it's all of these things. You have to be committed to it. It has to be about more than filling seats."
Universities and colleges that are serious about enrolling more Hispanic students can find them if they want to, said Sylvia Hurtado, a professor of education at UCLA. "You don't have to look very far."
But, she added, "you need [to provide] support at each stage. We call it being more culturally responsive, more aware of who you're recruiting and what their needs might be."
Universities are beginning to do this, if slowly. UCLA itself didn't launch a Spanish-language version of its admissions website until 2023, Hurtado pointed out — "and here we are in California."
New pressures as DEI comes under fire
Even the smallest efforts to enroll and support Hispanic students are being complicated by the withdrawal of diversity programs and financial help for undocumented students.
Florida in February ended a policy of charging lower in-state tuition at public colleges and universities to undocumented students, for instance. Other states have imposed or are considering similar measures.
The Trump administration has jettisoned a Biden-era program to support Hispanic-serving institutions. And the U.S. Department of Education, in a letter to colleges, interpreted the 2023 Supreme Court ruling banning racial preferences in admission as prohibiting "race-based decision-making, no matter the form."
While the legal basis for that action has been widely challenged, it has higher education institutions on edge.
Experts say most programs to recruit and support Hispanic students probably wouldn't be affected by the anti-DEI campaigns, since they're offered to anyone who needs them. "These things work for all students," said Anne-Marie Núñez, executive director of the Diana Natalicio Institute for Hispanic Student Success at the University of Texas at El Paso.
But without more of the growing Hispanic population enrolling in colleges, those institutions and the workforce face much bigger challenges, Núñez and others said.
"Having students succeed is in everybody's interest," she said. "The country will get left behind if it doesn't have all hands on deck, including those who education has not served in the past."
At Dominican, Genaro Balcazar leads enrollment and marketing strategies as chief operating officer. He, too, has a pragmatic way of looking at it.
"We address the needs of the students not because of who they are," said Balcazar, "but because they need the help."
This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.
Contact writer Jon Marcus at 212-678-7556 or jmarcus@hechingerreport.org.
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