Male students from minority backgrounds are disappearing from college campuses and becoming increasingly less likely to complete their college education, according to a recent study by the Pew Hispanic Research Center.
In 2011, the National Conference of State Legislatures found that only 19 percent of Latino adults have a college degree in the U.S., compared to 42 percent of white and 26 percent of black adults.
A 2013 University of California, Los Angeles study also found that 62.9 percent of Latino students enrolled in college campuses are female, and the gender gap is continuing to grow.
“The universities have not made an effort to also keep, retain and recruit Latino males,” said Victor Rodriguez, a professor in the Chicano and Latino studies department at Cal State Long Beach. “Part of the reason is that nobody has said anything about it. Nobody has really highlighted that this is an issue.”
Rodriguez said that Latino males are falling behind not only because of economic reasons but also because of cultural and sociological reasons.
“When Latino males are racialized, they develop an oppositional identity, which means they consider the good students to be the white students,” Rodriguez said. “They do not want to be seen as whitewashed by their peers and as a result, stop pursuing higher education.”
Male Latino students are at a disadvantage from an early age, Rodriguez said, because they usually come from impoverished neighborhoods, poorly funded schools and are rarely encouraged to seek a higher education after graduation.
Strong gender roles also make it easier for Latino men to be pushed into provider roles for their families, whereas Latino women are encouraged by their families to seek higher education because it is an accepted role for females, Rodriguez said.
“There is a lot of pressure for older men or boys to go into labor at an early age” said Jose Felix Cruz, a Latino student at CSULB. “You start working really early, and so I think that’s one of the major things because a lot of people are struggling financially.”
Sometimes, the Latino culture sees pursuing higher education as a feminine endeavor, which also discourages Latinos from completing their college education, Rodriguez said.
“They are holding on to some masculine idea that men don’t read and are not good at school, and they live up to that and so they do not go seriously pursuing a higher education,” said Rodriguez.
According to Armando Vazquez-Ramos, a Chicano and Latino studies professor at CSULB,
Latino females are doing “tremendously better” than they were 40 years ago.
“We have an enormous amount of Latino students in higher education, close to 140,000 in the CSU, but 60 percent are Latinas,” Vazquez-Ramos said. “We have 12,000 Latino students in our campus, but still 60 percent or more are Latinas.”
Vazquez-Ramos said that changes in California’s education system would help to address the problem.
“We need to reverse the trend of Latino males at an early age ending behind bars, in the drug and gang cycle and simply wasting their time going to work flipping patties,” Vazquez-Ramos said. “That’s what we have to reverse.”
