ATLANTA
Squeezed by stiff competition for their traditional students, historically Black colleges are making a push to recruit Hispanics.
While the country’s Hispanic population is booming, the number of Blacks is growing at a much slower rate and other colleges are doing more to attract them. Black colleges that want to shore up enrollment numbers are revising recruitment strategies to include more members of the nation’s largest and fastest-growing minority.
HBCUs are hiring Hispanic recruiters, distributing brochures featuring Hispanic students and establishing special scholarships for Hispanics. At the historically Black Texas Southern University in Houston, the school has started five Hispanic student organizations, including fraternities and sororities, to help make the campus more inviting.
“I tell them ‘There’s a place for you and a need for Latinos to be present on [historically Black] campuses,” says Nelson Santiago, a recruiter for Howard University in Washington, D.C. A native of Puerto Rico, Santiago talks to students about his experiences as a student at Howard, where he graduated in 2001.
Recruiters like Santiago and others from schools including the all-male Morehouse College in Atlanta are visiting predominantly Hispanic high schools and setting up booths at college fairs geared toward Hispanic students. Morehouse sends recruiters to high schools in South Florida, New York, East Texas and Los Angeles areas with large Hispanic populations.
“Considering Latinos and African-Americans share a lot of history together that they don’t realize, I think it’s a good idea,” says John Miranda, of Silver Spring, Md., one of 15 Hispanics enrolled at the 2,800-student Morehouse.
