Are College Enrollment Demographics on a Cliff?

U.S. public universities and colleges, especially community colleges, lost almost 20 percent of their undergraduate enrollment in 2020 during the shutdown and struggled in 2021 to come back with their partial masked, hybrid virtual-in person offerings without changing the tuition. The question is, is the decline permanent? Especially among the largest and fastest-growing college demographic in 2019 – Latinos? This was the focus of a panel of college recruitment officers sponsored by the Chronicle of Higher Education on Feb. 17, and a Feb. 12 piece by the same publication: Sarah Brown’s “The Missing Hispanic Students.”

Cut to the chase: Brown writes that in general, Hispanic students often hold pragmatic views about college, believing that its purpose is to help them get a job. According to Deborah Santiago of Excelencia in Education, Hispanic/Latino students are less likely to take out loans, preferring to pay for college as they go. Many are also parents and struggle with school shutdowns and lack of child care.

A tactical recruitment plan is needed. Federal pandemic relief funding stemmed some bleeding for colleges, but that money will run out in 2023. Hispanic recruitment experts say colleges should make sure they involve students’ families, with Spanish-language programs for parents who don’t speak English; improve the on-campus environment and experience, both inside and outside the classroom; and adjust course schedules to accommodate part-time jobs, child and family care obligations.

The CofHE panel emphasized how the job of recruitment officers had changed from one dealing with alumni and donors to becoming on-the-ground student recruiters. They are now involved with accountability for the size of the student body and the college’s place in the higher education marketplace. Options included offering mini-degrees and flexible classes, exam and graduation times, and increasing the number of foreign students.  The officers agreed that they are the front line of the college’s COVID battle.       

Will LatinX Become Just an Academic Term?

“The term ‘Latinx’ isn’t popular with Latinos,” a Wall Street Journal headline blared on Dec. 30, 2021. “Don’t call us Latinx”, warned another in the Washington Times on Dec. 22. “According to a 2021 November poll by Bendixen & Amandi, only 2 percent of Americans of Latino descent refer to themselves that way. 68% prefer “Hispanic” to Latino or Latina, and 40% are offended by Latinx. But according to CA Democratic Congresswoman Grace Napolitano, the term will continue to be popular among younger generations … and in academia. It will be interesting to see if ads in Spanish and English will use the term “Latinx” as politicians in 2022 reach out to the increasing numbers of Hispanic “swing voters.”

El Muro – A “Woke. Wake-up” View of Border Walls at the National Building Museum

The National Building Museum’s new wonderfully graphic exhibit called “El Muro” was purported to be about “a timely examination of the role of design, architecture, planning and engineering in the application of an ancient theme: building walls in the name of national security.” The purpose of the exhibit is to “create a broader context for understanding the 21st-century border issues and challenges.”

The exhibit focuses almost entirely on some 2,000 miles of the U.S. Southern border – about 700 miles of which is divided by a physical barrier – a wall or a fence of some kind. Titled “El Muro” (the wall in Spanish) the exhibit is presented in four sections with highly professional displays of photographs, videos, graphics (such as a red line on the floor depicting U.S. cities on one side and Mexican cities on the other), timelines, and exhibits of real life objects to portray the impact of the wall on “real” people. Exhibited items include teeter totters built between iron fences from Tijuana, and displays of toys and children’s clothing abandoned along the border.

A timeline history running along the wall in the first sections shows the dates of border events in the US.; the responses to the events and the “fears” (the word “challenges” was not used) that drove the events. For example, according to the exhibit, “the fear of Chinese” in the 1880s led to the first U.S. immigration law in 1886. In fact, it was the objections by U.S. labor unions about the tens of thousands of Chinese who had entered California since the gold rush and statehood and threatened jobs for U.S. workers that drove the new law. Indeed, Chinese scholars and doctors were welcomed but not allowed to naturalize.

“We wanted the exhibit to provoke questions about the impact of barriers on migrants,” the Director of Exhibits told the Hispanic Outlook. “It’s not political. We don’t get into immigration. Of course we recognize and understand that all countries have borders. But they are man-made. We consider them to be “places”. They change over time. This exhibit is about the impact of the man-made walls and other barriers that obstruct people’s entry. After the tumult of the Trump years, we thought it appropriate to address the equity and social justice issues of border walls that we touched on in our highly successful exhibit on ‘evictions.’”

She is right. The NBM’s focus on the impact of border walls raises questions for viewers: about globalism and the integrity of sovereign nation-states and their right to defend their borders with laws, weapons, legislation and defense alliances; the rights of citizenship and loyalty to one country and the duty of nation-states to protect themselves from hostile neighbors.

These are especially provocative questions this week during the siege of Ukraine by Russia. As noted by the Kenyan representative to the United Nations, Martin Kimani, on Feb. 27, “we in Africa are concerned that Russia seems to consider Ukraine as a part of Russia and not a sovereign nation-state recognized by the United Nations and international law. That designation is our insurance policy for smaller nations to be protected from the assaults of stronger ones”.

The exhibit El Muro is on view until Nov. 6, 2022.