[lg policy] In the STEM Fields, How Hispanic Students Pay for Their Education Affects Success

[Harold Schiffman]

In the STEM Fields, How Hispanic Students Pay for Their Education
Affects Success

By Elyse Ashburn

As the Hispanic population grows, such students are increasingly a
linchpin in state and federal plans to get more students trained in
the science, technology, engineering, and math fields. But Hispanic
students are also heavily underrepresented among degree recipients in
those so-called STEM fields—and a new report from the Center for Urban
Education provides some recommendations for changing that.

The report, "Tapping HSI-STEM Funds to Improve Latina and Latino
Access to STEM Professions," argues that the Hispanic achievement gaps
at the baccalaureate, master's, and doctoral levels exist in large
part because of finances. "A lot of discussion about participation
hasn't acknowledged that fact," said Lindsey E. Malcom, one of the
co-authors and an assistant professor at the University of California
at Riverside.

Hispanic students are more likely than their peers to come from
low-income families—and that affects not only the competing demands on
their time and money but also the types of institutions they are most
likely to attend. Such students disproportionately start their college
educations at community colleges and Hispanic-serving four-year
colleges, which typically have lower costs. In turn, the researchers
say, those institutions tend to have fewer resources, often leaving
them less equipped to support students and to prepare them for
graduate work.

The report recommends that colleges, particularly those with large
Hispanic populations, work to better inform students of their full
range of financial-aid options. It also pushes colleges to recognize
that many Hispanic undergraduates are supporting themselves and are
more likely to work and to put in longer hours than their peers.

"We're not saying that's a good or a bad strategy," said Alicia C.
Dowd, an associate professor of higher education at the University of
Southern California and co-director of the Center for Urban Education.
Rather, working students are a reality that more colleges need to
structure their curriculum around. For example, the report says,
colleges should incorporate research opportunities into the core
curriculum in STEM fields, rather than making research an after-class
option.

In particular, the report focuses on the improvements that
Hispanic-serving institutions could make with new federal funds. Those
four-year and community colleges, which receive a federal designation
based on Hispanic students comprising at least 25 percent of their
undergraduate student body, are eligible to compete for grants from a
$100-million annual pool to improve STEM students' experiences. The
grant money was allotted as part of the health-care reform package and
is slated to be available through 2019.

Report Recommendations
The report recommends that, among other things, grant applicants use
the funds to:

•Increase support for intensive junior- and senior-year STEM research
experiences.
•Develop high-profile opportunities for community-college and
four-year professors to work together to ensure that their colleges'
curricula align.
•Have community-college and four-year college faculty collaborate on
research to develop the professional networks that create
opportunities for STEM transfer students to access research
laboratories and scientific studies at universities.
•Support programs—such as bringing guest speakers to campus—to involve
faculty in networking with scientists and engineers in the private
sector.
The report is the third in a series, funded by the National Science
Foundation, looking at ways to improve Hispanic students' access to
and success in STEM fields. The full reports are available on the
Center for Urban Education's Web site.

http://chronicle.com/article/In-the-STEM-Fields-How/125318/

--
=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+

 Harold F. Schiffman

Professor Emeritus of
 Dravidian Linguistics and Culture
Dept. of South Asia Studies
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305

Phone:  (215) 898-7475
Fax:  (215) 573-2138

Email:  haroldfs at gmail.com
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/

-------------------------------------------------

_______________________________________________
This message came to you by way of the lgpolicy-list mailing list
lgpolicy-list at groups.sas.upenn.edu
To manage your subscription unsubscribe, or arrange digest format: https://groups.sas.upenn.edu/mailman/listinfo/lgpolicy-list