Despite the gains minorities have made in student enrollment and higher education leadership, the needle needs to move further and faster in the next 25 years to narrow the widening educational achievement equity gap.
When 22-year-old Roberto Rosas was awarded his bachelor’s in electrical engineering this spring from the University of Texas at San Antonio, it marked a major milestone for his family.L
Like a growing number of students of color, Rosas is the first person in his family to graduate from college, a feat he achieved based on sheer determination to better himself and the lives of those around him.
“My family was just in shock,” Rosas says. They didn’t think it was possible for anyone in our family to go to college.” He says he received “no inspiration or motivation” from his high school teachers and counselors, although he was in the top 10 percent of his high school graduating class. “I wanted to do something better.”
The experiences of Rosas help put a real face on myriad reports that show a steady increase in the number of minorities earning college degrees in the United States over the past 25 years. Degrees earned, one measure of academic achievement and increasingly a required ticket for getting a well-paying job in this country, are up in all ethnic groups, according to the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) and a more narrowly focused report released this spring by the National Association for Equal Opportunity in Higher Education.
Substantive Gains
For the 2006-2007 academic year, the latest figures available from NCES, Blacks earned 9.6 percent of all bachelor’s degrees awarded, Hispanics 7.5 percent, Asians 6.9 percent and American Indians 0.8 percent. Whites earned 72.2 percent of all bachelor’s degrees awarded and foreign students 3 percent. For 1984-1985, the corresponding numbers were 6.1 percent, 2.8 percent, 3.4 percent and 0.4 percent. For Whites, in 1984-1985, the corresponding numbers were 88 percent. There was no calculation for foreign students.
