Science & Latinos: It’s in their blood

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Updated: January 23, 2012 10:49AM

Samantha Avalos dreams of becoming a surgeon and Thalia Chiquisala wants to be a pediatrician.

The high school students tell me they love science and that their parents encourage them to do well in school. They are students at the Instituto Health Sciences Career Academy, a charter school located in Pilsen that works to prepare the next generation of physicians, nurses and bio-technicians.

Last September, the Instituto Health Sciences Career Academy opened its doors to 600 students. The school is a $22 million project of the Instituto del Progreso Latino, an organization founded in 1977 that provides educational and citizenship services for the area residents.

In a few years, Samantha and Thalia may well join the growing number of Latinos who are enrolling in medical school across the country, as a recent cover story in this newspaper reported. The number of Latino applicants to medical school has increased 22.9 percent. That is an increase of nearly 6 percent between 2010 and 2011, from 3,271 to 3,459.

In spite of this encouraging trend, the number of Latino applicants is still low and does not reflect the rapid growth of the Latino population in the country. The same can be said about careers in engineering and other highly technical fields.

Two problems plague Latino youth and contribute to the low numbers of Latino doctors and engineers: a pervasive high school dropout rate and a tendency towards blue-collar employment.

In Chicago, 30 percent of Latino males 19 to 24 years old lack a high school education. And a new DePaul University study, released last week by the New Journalism on Latino Children project, shows that at least 40 percent of U.S born Mexican-Americans work in the same low skilled jobs as immigrants born in Mexico.

This is a perfect storm for Chicago and the country. As the baby boomer generation retires, many Latinos — the fastest growing population in the nation — will not be ready for the challenges of a highly technological world.

I fondly remember the 1988 movie “Stand and Deliver,” in which mathematics teacher Jaime Escalante (played by Edward James Olmos) convinced his low-income Latino students that they have the potential to pass an advanced placement test in calculus.

“You burros have math in your blood,” says Escalante to his students, referring to the achievements in astronomy of Aztecs and Mayas.

Juan Salgado, president and CEO of the Instituto del Progreso Latino, says the key is to invest in education — and he is not talking only about more state and federal funding.

In fact, the establishment of the Instituto Health Sciences Career Academy was made possible by a combination of public and private funding. Medical institutions and corporations provide mentoring, internships and career shadowing.

A similar initiative is Discovering Health Care Careers of Children’s Memorial Hospital, which offers a summer internship for Latino high school students.

This is the kind of investment that government, community organizations, schools and corporations should do more of, giving more Latino and other minority students a chance to become doctors, engineers and computer whizzes. It is in their blood.