Unable to sleep one night, Dustin Morrow was scrolling through the usual blur of posts and advertisements on Facebook when a commercial for the University of Minnesota caught his eye — and held it for ten minutes. The video was entirely in Ojibwe, the language his ancestors had spoken for centuries.
Then a recent graduate from the Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwe Community College in Wisconsin, Morrow is now a junior at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. As an enrolled member of the Lac Courte Oreilles tribe, he’s among a community of Native Americans at the school that has experienced a significant rise in enrollment and retention within the past decade.
What’s more, all this happened as the University of Minnesota’s general admissions rate, like so many other schools across the nation, had been declining since 2005, begging the question: What changed?
Bridging Cultures
According to Postsecondary National Policy Institute data, while 60% of the U.S. population pursues higher education after high school, only 17% of Native Americans continue onward, meaning they remain among the most underrepresented groups in higher education — the reasons, for which, remain various and complex. For instance, Native Americans are statistically more likely to attend low-performing high schools, more likely to be first-generation students and more likely to qualify for financial assistance than White students.
Additionally, they face barriers that remain difficult to quantify, such as familial obligations, a historical distrust of federal institutions, imposter syndrome and cultural isolation.
