Shortly after Jesse Melgar was accepted to UCLA, he sat down with his dad to tackle his financial aid application, an especially daunting process for the Melgar family.
Now external vice president of the Undergraduate Students Association Council, Melgar is a first-generation college student, so his dad was just as new to the application as he was. The two men were guided by one glaring fact: between both their bank accounts, they had $5,000 to pay for college.
Melgar’s dad said he’d try to stretch that to fund a year at UCLA at most.
Melgar’s experience is shared by Latino students entering four-year institutions across the country, according to a study released earlier this month by the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA’s Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. The survey of college freshmen showed the difference in household income between Latino and non-Hispanic white students at four-year institutions is four times what it was 30 years ago. The jump was from $7,986 in 1975 to $32,965 in 2006.
Melgar said that while a generous collection of student loans helped pay for his four years at UCLA, he still remembers the effect of that conversation with his father.
“That kind of put it into perspective for me, what the realities of college would be and how money would impact that,” Melgar said.
The study also revealed that money weighs more heavily on the minds of Latino freshmen, 20 percent of whom listed major concerns about paying for college, as opposed to only 8.6 percent of white freshmen.
Chris Ibarra, a fourth-year history student, said money had an enormous effect on his college choice.
After transferring from community college, he still spends most of his work income to pay for college. “I had to keep my parents out of the loop only because they simply do not have the money to send me to college,” Ibarra said.
The study showed that the number of college-bound Latinos has increased, but researchers said that figure is misleading.
“If you look at the raw numbers, you’ll say, “˜Oh, gee, everything’s hunky dory,'” said Sylvia Hurtado, director of the Higher Education Research Institute and one of the study’s coauthors.
According to her, the increase in Latino freshmen has not kept pace with the growing number of Latino high school graduates.
“There was as an astounding amount of stability over 30 years in terms of still being in last place for a number of things,” Hurtado said.
The study brought troubling news for Latino males who were 39 percent of Latino freshmen in 2006, down from 57.4 percent three decades earlier. The downward trend for Latino and other minority males is a complex mix of societal influences that deserves more research, said Victor Saenz, a professor of education at the University of Texas and a coauthor of the study.
“I do not buy the notion that black and Latino boys don’t want to be academically successful,” Saenz said.
Using self-surveys, the study also found that Latino freshmen express a higher drive to achieve compared to non-Hispanic white students. Latinos also reported aspiring to higher-level degrees relative to white students.
Latino students on campus agreed that they often notice a stronger drive among their peers.
Gaby Rosca, president of the Latin American Students Association, said that increased work ethic most likely stems from growing up in a low-income environment.
“If coming into college, your reality is that if you don’t succeed … you’re going to be having a low minimum-wage job, of course that drive is going to be that much stronger,” Rosca said.
Jesse Melgar didn’t hesitate to link his low-income background to his current job as USAC external vice president, a job where he said he works to make college more affordable for other underrepresented students. He said he sees a lot of students like himself inspired to work in groups advocating for social justice.
“We kind of have this sense of obligation to use our time here and our privilege of receiving higher education to return that privilege back to the communities we come from.”