Reaching For The Stars: 20 Years Of Success In Advising Potential Latino Engineering Students

Abstract NOTE: The first page of text has been automatically extracted and included below in lieu of an abstract Session 2470 Reaching for the Stars: 20 Years of Success in Advising Potential Latino Engineering Students José L. Torres, Rosa Gerra Indiana Institute of Technology/United Hispanic Americans Inc. Introduction Access to higher education has long been considered one of the cornerstones upon which true racial and social equality must be built upon (Morrison, 1995.) Unfortunately, even after most significant social and legal barriers have been torn down, college enrollment among the two largest minority groups still lags behind that of the majority population. As shown in Figure 1, in recent years the College enrollment of African American and Latino students has grown at a faster rate of that of Caucasian students, but much remains to be done. 1.50 15.0 African - American 1.25 12.5 Caucasian 1.00 10.0 0.75 0.75 Latino 0.50 0.50 Figure 1. College enrollment in the U.S., 1984-1994. (Note that the Caucasian students curve is plotted on a different scale, shown at the right). (Chronicle, 1997) In the particular case of Hispanic/Latino students, national statistics show a significant lag behind other racial groups in the U.S., as shown in Table 1. Non-Hispanics Hispanics Completed High School 81.6% 52.6% Received a B.S. degree 13.7% 5.9% Table 1. Some characteristics of ethnic groups in the U.S. (Chronicle, 1997).