The report finds that more Latinos are earning high school diplomas and entering college, but remain underrepresented in every segment of higher education and have significantly lower levels of college degree attainment than other racial/ethnic groups. In fact, only 12% of Latino working-age adults (between 25- and 64-years old) have a bachelor's degree compared with 42% of White adults.
The report asserts that statewide public policies and college and university practices are major barriers to Latino students completing college. A broken college remedial education system, admissions policies that bar the consideration of race/ethnicity, state disinvestment in higher education, and the absence of a statewide plan for higher education are several of the factors contributing to low degree attainment rates for Latinos.
The good news is that Latinos are now more likely to have a high school diploma and complete the college preparatory A-G courses than in years past. They are enrolling in college in larger numbers and are more likely to graduate with a college degree than two decades ago. Each new generation of Latino Californians is more educated than previous ones.
But overall, the educational attainment of the Latino population lags other racial/ethnic groups. Too few Latino students are being prepared to enter college when less than one in three (29%) Latino high school graduates complete the coursework necessary to be eligible applicants to the California State University (CSU) and University of California (UC) systems. Even when prepared, eligible applicants are still finding it challenging to secure a spot at some of the state's public universities. At the UC, for example, admission rates for Latinos have declined by 28 points since 1994. Once on a college campus, Latino students, many of whom are first in their families to go to college, do not receive the supports and guidance to transfer and earn a degree on time. The six-year completion rates for Latinos at the California Community Colleges and the California State University, where 76% of Latinos are enrolled, are 39% and 45%, respectively.
The results of the study come as the California economy is facing a shortage of college graduates. “Workforce preparedness continues to be one of the top concerns for the business community. “The State of Higher Education in California – Latino Report” demonstrates the critical need to better prepare Latino students to achieve academic success that meets the demands of our global economy,” said Rob Lapsley, President of the California Business Roundtable. “If we are going to remain competitive, our colleges and universities must do better to address the ongoing barriers that jeopardize Latino students' ability to complete their education and succeed in our 21st Century workplace.”
“The future of our economy and the state will rise or fall on the educational success of Latinos,” said Michele Siqueiros, President of the Campaign for College Opportunity. “When you realize that one in two children under 18 is Latino and that California is going to face a shortage of 2.3 million college educated workers in the next ten years, then you have to care about increasing the number of Latino students who are prepared for, enroll in and graduate from college.”
California's colleges and universities are not adapting to serve the students in their classrooms. Today's students tend to be first in their families to go to college, work more hours, may be older and may have already started families, and are typically low-income or financially independent. Today's students and the workforce they will enter are different from students and the workforce fifty years ago, but the state's public colleges and universities are taking the same approach to delivering course material and supports which do not meet the needs of today's students or California's economy.
“Simply hoping more Latinos will earn college credentials is not a strategy for meeting California's serious workforce crisis. We need a plan with resources behind it to fix the points at which our colleges and universities are letting promising Latino students fall out of the system,” said Siqueiros.
The report highlights that although Latinos have the greatest graduation success at the University of California relative to their graduation rates at the California Community Colleges and California State University, they are significantly underrepresented in the system. The data suggests this is partly a result of Proposition 209, the 1996 measure that prohibits the state from considering race, sex or ethnicity in employment, contracting and education. An examination of two decades of data revealed that admission rates for Latinos have declined by 28 points overall, 45 points at UC Berkeley and 46 points at UCLA -- far in excess of the drops in admission rates of other racial/ethnic groups.
“The disparities highlighted in this report are critical as we plan the future of the state of California,” stated Thomas A. Saenz, MALDEF President and General Counsel and Chair of the board of the Campaign for College Opportunity. “The report should lead to immediate legislative and administrative efforts to address the serious education gaps identified, which threaten our state's continued leadership nationally and globally.”
The report first and foremost calls on the Governor, legislature and college leaders for an overarching plan to close opportunity gaps between Latinos and their White and Asian peers and address the looming workforce crisis.
The report outlines a series of recommendations to help increase college access and success:
- Ensure all colleges successfully move students through pre-college level courses, quickly and with improved retention rates
- Provide students with clear transfer pathways to four-year degrees
- Expand college knowledge in middle and high school and invest in support services students need to succeed
- Fund colleges for both enrollment growth and successful outcomes
- Strengthen financial support options for low-to moderate-income college students Allow California's public universities to use race/ethnicity as one of many factors in weighing an applicant's qualifications for admission.
California is undergoing one of the largest demographic, cultural and economic transformations in its history,” said Siqueiros. “Whether we address or ignore the challenges and opportunities of strengthening educational success for the burgeoning Latino population will define our economic and democratic success as a state and nation for decades to come.”
Source: College Campaign.org press release, Report Finds California Failing to Produce Enough Latino College Grads: Future of State Economy in Jeopardy, by Audrey Dow, April 29, 2015
- Author: Ann King Filmer
When you think casually of “food,” you may think of your next meal or your favorite food. “World food” may broaden your thinking to include international cuisines, global hunger, or a growing population. But the academic fields related to food are numerous. Food is one of life’s basic necessities, and along with its associated issues it is essential to the health and well-being of everyone, whatever their locale, education, or income level.
The new World Food Center at UC Davis will take on a broad purview related to food, including sustainable agricultural and environmental practices, food security and safety, hunger, poverty reduction through improved incomes, health and nutrition, population growth, new foods, genomics, food distribution systems, food waste, intellectual property distribution related to food, economic development and new technologies and policies.
With rapid global population growth occurring on smaller amounts of arable land, coupled with the expected impacts of climate change on food production, understanding the sustainability of food into the future is critical.
The new center’s website notes, “The World Food Center at UC Davis takes a ‘big picture’ approach to sustainably solving humanity’s most pressing problems in food and health. By bringing together world-class scientists with innovators, philanthropists and industry and public leaders, the center will generate the kind of visionary knowledge and practical policy solutions that will feed and nurture people for decades to come.”
In establishing the World Food Center, UC Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi said, “We did this to fully capitalize on our depth and expertise as the world’s leading university for education, research and scholarship on all aspects of food, but especially the nexus between food and health.”
UC Davis is the top-ranked agricultural university in the world, and California is the major producer of vegetables and fruit in the nation. Tom Tomich, director of the Agricultural Sustainability Institute and professor in the Department of Environmental Science and Policy at UC Davis, says of the World Food Center’s location at UC Davis, “There’s no place else that has the right mix of educational programs, research facilities, and the engagement with the state.”
The major academic disciplines surrounding food are found at UC Davis — agriculture, the environment, medicine, veterinary medicine, engineering, social and cultural sciences, and management. More than 30 centers and institutes at UC Davis will be pulled together through the World Food Center. The combination of scholarship, leadership, and partnerships at UC Davis has already established the campus as a center for food-related science and outreach. This new center will reinforce that strength and broaden the university’s ability to tackle tough global issues related to food.
Although the founding director of the center has yet to be named, Josette Lewis, Ph.D., was recently appointed as the associate director of the World Food Center. Her background on international research and development for the U.S. Agency for International Development, and director of its Office of Agriculture, honed her skills to take on the World Food Center. It was at US AID that she worked on a major global hunger and food security initiative, establishing her expertise on issues related to global agricultural development and food security.
As the new World Food Center becomes fully developed, it will be well-positioned on campus to continue to solve the major global issues related to food that are a hallmark of UC Davis.
Additional information:
- Posted By: Myriam Grajales-Hall
- Written by: The Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, Families USA
While Medicaid covers many more white people, because blacks and Latinos tend to have lower incomes than whites,3 they are more than twice as likely to rely on Medicaid for health coverage. In both black and Latino communities, a little more than one in four people relies on Medicaid for their health care;.
Medicaid helps roughly half of all black and Latino children get a healthy start in life. And it helps black and Latino seniors and people with disabilities who need long-term care.
Specifically for the Latino community Medicaid covers nearly one in four Latino with cancer, more than 25 percent of Latinos with diabetes are covered by Medicaid and nearly two in five Latinos with lung disease are covered by Medicaid.
The study concludes that cuts to Medicaid, whether at the state or federal level, would mean the loss of essential health care for people of color who rely on Medicaid, including millions of blacks and Latinos with serious health care needs. Proportionally, cuts to the program have a much wider and deeper impact on the black and Latino communities than on whites because a significantly higher share of these communities depends on the Medicaid lifeline, including roughly half of all black and Latino children.
Source: Hispanically Speaking News, Study: Latinos and Blacks Will be the Most Hurt With Medicaid Cuts, November 6, 2011.
- Author: Jim Coats
"Some hae meat, and canna eat,
And some wad eat that want it . . ."
The words are old and a little hard to understand, but they tell a story that's as true today as when the poet Robert Burns spoke them back in the 1790s. They were old words even then. Always, it seems, there are those of us who are fortunate enough to eat well and those of us who go hungry, even in a country as rich as ours.
One morning last May, I got to meet some folks who help ease that hunger in the community where I live. That morning I drove with my wife to an industrial area on the northeast side of Woodland, California, where the Food Bank of Yolo County does its business. Outside the warehouse door delivery trucks from local markets, chain stores, farms, and other food sources came and went, mingling with buyers' pickups and trailers from churches and other charitable groups.
The big trucks were there to deliver what many retailers would consider marginal goods: bread, dairy products, meats, and canned and dry goods that were moving too slowly off the shelves or getting too close to their sell-by dates; a cardboard harvest bin of loose carrots in the walk-in, donated by a grower who was getting ready to put in a new crop; 50-pound sacks of potatoes or onions that were either too much for the food service market or were set aside by generous handlers or a government agency for exactly the purpose they were about to serve: to feed the hungry.
These days about 35 percent of the stock you can see in this Food Bank warehouse has been donated outright. The rest comes from government agencies or direct purchases from the California Association of Food Banks. A few years ago the directors of the Food Bank of Yolo County shifted their focus toward providing clients with fresher, more nutritious food, and since then they have brought their fresh produce sales from about 50,000 pounds a year up to a high of 1 million pounds in 2010.
That morning in May my wife and I joined other groups of buyers inside the warehouse, each of us picking through the low-priced goods for just the right mix of products to refill the shelves of a soup kitchen or—as in our case—a local food closet. Loaves of bread, a case of canned tomatoes, a box of apples, macaroni and cheese mix, a shrink-wrapped bundle of bags of flour. We loaded our wheeled dolly three times: first came the bread, which a food bank volunteer weighed before we loaded it into the truck; then the produce, likewise weighed on the dolly and loaded; and finally the canned and dry goods, which are priced by the case. Five flats of eggs we put in the pickup's back seat for a smooth ride. For a little less than $100 we got enough food to fill the truck.
A short trip then took us back to the food closet at our church, where 8 or 10 women and men, most of them well into their retirement years, bustled around the edges of the sorting table that filled the middle of the small room, stacking cans on shelves, putting bread, tortillas, and eggs into the refrigerators, doling potatoes, onions, rice, and beans from 50-pound sacks into smaller, consumer-sized bags, and pointing out to me firmly and kindly each time I put a box or bag down in the wrong place. Which was pretty often. Before an hour was up, the closet was stocked and locked up and ready for food distribution the next day. Two distributions a week from our closet alone can serve up to 50 families in need.
There's plenty that you can do, too, to help relieve hunger in your own community. Find your nearest food bank on the California Association of Food Banks website, or ask around to find out about local food closets or soup kitchens.
Then all you need to do is pitch in. If you've got the time, they've got the need.
- Author: Norma De la Vega
According to the scientists, the rising rates of risk factors for liver cancer, such as obesity and chronic hepatitis C infection, may explain the significant increase in liver cancer rates among US-born Hispanic men in California. In addition, higher levels of these risk factors, as well as heavy alcohol consumption among US-born Hispanic men as compared to their foreign-born counterparts, may explain the significant difference in rates between the two groups.
California Health Interview Survey data show that levels of obesity and alcohol abuse are higher in US-born than foreign-born Hispanic men. According to the researchers, the next steps are to find out what other liver cancer risk factors differ by birthplace, and then develop ways to target those factors especially in US-born Hispanic men to lower their risk of liver cancer. Such efforts could likely include treatment for alcohol abuse; lifestyle changes to prevent or manage diabetes and obesity, such as getting regular exercise, and improving diet.The study suggests the need for such measures to be culturally and linguistically tailored to reach Hispanics of lower socioeconomic status and those living in more ethnically concentrated neighborhoods.
Source: Cancer Prevention Institute of California, “Liver cancer rapidly increasing in California Hispanic Men”, February 15, 2011