Black Colleges Diversifying By Recruiting More Hispanics

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.

Miranda, the 21-year-old son of Brazilian immigrants, says he picked Morehouse because he was offered a full scholarship by an Atlanta foundation that promotes the education of Hispanics.

Morehouse’s goal is for at least 5 percent of its student body to be made up of Hispanics within five years. If its current overall enrollment holds steady, the school will need 125 more Hispanic students by 2011 to reach that goal.

While the idea has been greeted with open arms by the college’s administrators, some students and alumni say they are mixed about actively recruiting Hispanics to historically Black colleges.

“I do have concerns,” says Earl Nero, a retired Atlanta businessman who graduated from Morehouse in 1974. “Since the college has determined they want to stay the same size they are, that would take away space from qualified African-American students.”

But having other minorities attending a historically Black college will help them get “a real life view about what Black people are all about,” Nero adds.

Student James Travis, who is Black, says having students of other races on a historically Black campus bothers him “a little bit” because it challenges the college’s mission.

“It’s supposed to maintain the historically Black tradition,” says the 21-year-old student from the Atlanta suburb of College Park. “I’ll have to see how it goes before I see if I want to change the situation or not.”

Still, educators say the nation’s two largest minority groups are a natural fit on a college campus.

“They are both underserved communities when it comes to higher education,” says Michael Lomax, president and CEO of the United Negro College Fund. “We have got to educate them so that we can have a competitive work force in the 21st century.”

The number of Hispanic students attending historically Black colleges increased more than 60 percent from 1994 to 2004, while the number of Black students grew by 35 percent, according to the U.S. Department of Education.

Hispanics have surpassed Blacks as the nation’s largest minority. The number of Hispanics in the United States grew by nearly 60 percent in the 1990s, while the number of Blacks only grew by about 15 percent.

At the same time, the competition for Black students has increased as public colleges nationwide try to improve diversity by recruiting more minorities. Some state higher education systems, especially in the South, also have been forced by federal courts to meet specific Black recruitment goals under desegregation lawsuits still lingering from the 1960s.

“All colleges want to have a presence of African-American male students on their campus. It makes the competition very tough,” says Sterling Hudson, dean of admissions and records at Morehouse.

Five years ago, Texas Southern hired a Hispanic recruiter and began producing recruitment materials targeting Hispanics. Since then, Hispanic student enrollment has grown from 316 to almost 550. Right now, Hispanics make up about 5 percent of the 11,000-student body.

“We have the advantage as a HBCU to cater to the minority small classroom, small family-type environment,” says Hasan Jamil, assistant vice president for enrollment services.

Howard has about 170 Hispanic out of 11,500 students after several years of focused recruiting. Interim admissions director Linda Sanders-Hawkins says with the country’s growing Hispanic population, recruiting is not as tough as it once was.

Miranda says it has not bothered him being on a majority Black campus.

“Since I’ve been at Morehouse, I’ve gotten a different perspective on a lot of things,” Miranda says, referring to Black history. “I learned a lot that was left out of the schooling I got.”

— Associated Press

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