Latinos and college shape U.S. future

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Updated: June 23, 2011 12:51PM

Maria Alejandra Salazar will graduate in August with a bachelor’s degree in education and social policy from Northwestern University. Though she needs to take one more class, she was thrilled to participate in the school’s graduation ceremony in Evanston last week.

Salazar, who turns 22 in a few weeks, is a graduate of Niles North High School in Skokie, where she got used to being the only Latina student in a classroom. At least at Northwestern, where Latinos are about 7.5 percent of the undergraduate student body, she typically had a couple of fellow Latinos as classmates.

But those numbers still are low, and that tells a story. Salazar was one of the relatively few and proud Latinos graduating from a four-year American university this year, a big problem full of implications for Illinois and the rest of the country.

As you might know, Latinos are the fastest-growing segment of the U.S. population, and 37 percent of the nation’s 44 million Latinos are under age 20. By 2020, Latinos will make up 22 percent of the nation’s college-age population.

Latinos and other minorities will replace the retiring baby boomers and drive the future economy. And the job for today’s school officials, politicians, business and community leaders is to make sure those Latinos are up to the challenge.

On Monday, the College Board and Advocacy and Policy Center, based in New York City, released a study showing — and this should surprise nobody — that a great majority of young Latino and African-American men fail to go to college or earn a degree, and a large number end up unemployed or incarcerated.

Nationally, the study found, only 16 percent of Latino men and 28 percent of African-American men ages 25 to 35 have at least an associate’s degree, compared with 70 percent of Asian American and 44 percent of white men. Perhaps more distressing, 47 percent of Latinos ages 15 to 24 who have high school diplomas are unemployed. And the percentage of Latinos men who are incarcerated is 5 percent.

College Board President Gaston Caperton called the report’s bleak findings “a tragedy for America,” which is absolutely true.

Education has been the key to prosperity and competitiveness in our country, and it will continue to be as the population becomes more diverse.

Ten long years ago, the late Dr. Jorge Prieto, a Mexican-American physician who studied at Notre Dame and became president of the Chicago Board of Health, told me in an interview that he was worried about the lack of schooling among Latinos.

“We don’t want to grow in numbers and lag behind in education,” Prieto said.

Then as now, as Prieto knew, one of the biggest challenges the Latino community faces is getting young people to stay in school, straight through college. An uneducated individual — of any race or ethnic background — won’t be able to compete in our ever more complex global economy, and he or she is much less likely to participate in the political life of the country.

And that is just for starters. Experts will tell you about the correlation between dropping out of high school and gang violence and about the litany of other related social ills.

Fortunately, there are positive signs. More young Latinos are finishing high school. According to the U.S. Census, the percentage of Latinos ages 18 to 24 not enrolled in high school in 2008 was 22 percent — down from 34 percent in 1998.

And the number of Latinos attending a two-year college increased 85 percent, from 540,000 in 2000 to a 1 million in 2008.

That might mean efforts to reduce dropout rates among Latinos are beginning to work, and the day is coming when we will see more Latinos such as Maria Alejandra Salazar graduating from Northwestern, the University of Illinois at Chicago, Southern Illinois University and Harvard.