Title: More Hispanics are going to college and graduating, but disparity persists | PBS NewsHour
Headings: More Hispanics are going to college and graduating, but disparity persists
More Hispanics are going to college and graduating, but disparity persists
As the Hispanic student population grows, “you’re going to go from invisibility to pushback, to ultimately an acceptance.”

Content: If the divide isn’t narrowed, there won’t be enough educated workers to fill the high-skilled jobs left vacant by retiring baby boomers and annual household incomes for all Americans would drop by 5 percent by 2060, according to research conducted at Rice University. But eliminating longstanding achievement gaps isn’t easy, as Salem State has discovered. Since Almodovar enrolled, the graduation gap there has re-opened, reaching as high as 11 percentage points. Racist and anti-immigrant graffiti has appeared on the campus baseball diamond and bike path. And some students have begun demanding that the administration do more to diversify a faculty that is far whiter than its student body. In a campus climate survey, fewer than half of nonwhite students and faculty said they were “comfortable” at Salem State. The college’s successes — and its setbacks — show how hard it can be to build an inclusive campus and eliminate racial achievement gaps, especially in a time of deep national divisions. “We’re determined to get all our students across the finish line in the same amount of time, but we’re not all at the same starting line.” The stubborn gulf between white and Hispanic students is at least partly due to systemic disparities in education. Compared to their white peers, Hispanic students are less likely to attend preschool, and more likely to attend low-performing public primary and secondary schools with inexperienced teachers and high leadership turnover.