When Notre Dame de Namur, a 162-year-old Catholic college located in the San Francisco Bay area, began the 2007-08 school year, the college faced a crisis of declining enrollment. Notre Dame de Namur’s enrollment had peaked at 1,700 in 2003, but, four years later, student enrollment plummeted to 1,300, the lowest in recent history.
College officials took steps to address the problem. They adopted a strategic plan that included a comprehensive enrollment campaign. The plan also included a piece deemed important to the survival of the college—becoming a Hispanic-serving institution.
HSIs are two- or four-year nonprofit degree granting institutions that have an enrollment of at least 25 percent Hispanic.
Notre Dame de Namur’s Hispanic enrollment hovered around 17 percent in 2007. Today, Hispanic enrollment is 29 percent, according to a college spokesman. And that’s not all that’s grown. The college’s enrollment rose to slightly more than 2,000 in the fall of 2012.
“We have grown about 35 percent in the last five years,” says Hernan Bucheli, the college’s vice president for external affairs. “We’ve been growing pretty consistently and, for our scale, pretty significantly. The Hispanic serving strategy has played a big role in that.”
College officials and higher education experts say reaching out to Hispanic students is critical to the future of the college.
