RICHARDSON, Texas (Sept. 25, 2003) – A
group of scholars from The University of Texas at Dallas (UTD) has been invited by Harvard University
to present its research on barriers that discourage some first-generation Latino students from pursuing
higher educational opportunities beyond community colleges.

A research paper will be presented Oct. 11 at a national
conference titled “Community Colleges and Latino Educational Opportunity” on Harvard’s
campus in Cambridge, Mass. The conference, sponsored by The Civil Rights Project at Harvard and the
Pew Hispanic Center of the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication,
will feature the work of 25 top educators and researchers from around the country.

The UTD researchers, in a paper called “New Challenges
for Community Colleges: Latino Immigrants and the Transfer Process,” will address the low transfer
rates to four-year schools for some Latino students and the social, cultural and institutional barriers
these students encounter in transferring. The UTD group studied first-generation college students,
some of whom were born in the United States to parents who immigrated from Mexico and Central America
and others who were born in Mexico or Central America and immigrated to the U.S.

“The paper goes beyond the literature and addresses
the diversity among the Mexican and Central American immigrant populations and demonstrates that
different groups within these populations encounter similar but different transfer obstacles,” said
Dr. Bobby C. Alexander, an associate professor of sociology at UTD and one of the paper’s authors.

Among the factors identified by the UTD researchers
as barriers to transfer by Latinos to four-year colleges are:

  •  Low income and the need for more than one
    breadwinner in the family.
  •  Students’ unfamiliarity with educational
    requirements and the transfer process.
  •  A cultural view that often discourages women
    from pursuing higher education.
  •  Lack of role models within higher education
    and others who might serve as mentors.
  •  Improper documentation and lack of residency
    status.
  •  Difficulty of transferring credits from
    foreign institutions.
  •  Institutions’ rules, regulations and values
    that are often foreign concepts to students who are immigrants or children of immigrants.

In addition to Alexander, others involved in the study
were Dr. Laura Gonzalez, a U. T. Dallas research scientist; Dr. Dan O’Brien, an assistant professor
of economics at UTD; and Dr. Victor Garcia of Indiana University of Pennsylvania (IUP), who served
as a visiting research scientist at UTD. Alexander, Gonzalez and O’Brien currently teach in UTD’s
School of Social Sciences.

The Harvard paper is based, in part, on ethnographic
observations made by the researchers during a four-year project funded by the United States’ Department
of Education’s Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education . The project sought to recruit
and retain Latino students and transfer them from two-year schools in the Dallas County Community
College District (DCCCD) to four-year schools, utilizing an ethnographic field school in Oak Cliff,
which has Dallas’ largest concentration of Latinos.

The paper combines qualitative findings with quantitative
information from DCCCD and UTD’s Texas Schools Microdata Panel, part of a project to track and improve
the performance of Texas public school students. The researchers utilize these data both to demonstrate
the varied transfer rates and problems of the students studied and to compare their transfer profile
to other underrepresented racial and ethnic minorities and to whites.

According to the researchers’ findings, only one in
seven Latino students throughout Texas (14.1 percent) who start their college experience at a community
college have some four-year college experience during the next seven years, and less than half of
those students (5.4 percent) earn a bachelor’s degree. The comparable rates for white students statewide
are 21.1 percent and 11.1 percent, respectively.

In Dallas County, the numbers for Latinos are even
lower – only one in nine (11.3 percent) who start at community college obtain some four-year college
experience and 4.6 percent earn a bachelor’s degree, versus 22.8 percent and 12.2 percent, respectively,
for whites.

“While the paper focuses on Dallas County and
other metropolitan regions in Texas, it has national significance, since the barriers to education
and to the transfer process are common to these Latino populations across the nation,” UTD’s
Gonzalez said.

About UTD
The University of Texas at Dallas, located at the convergence of Richardson, Plano and Dallas in the heart
of the complex of major multinational technology corporations known as the Telecom Corridor,
enrolls more than 13,600 students. The school’s freshman class traditionally stands at the forefront
of Texas state universities in terms of average SAT scores. The university offers a broad assortment
of bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degree programs. For additional information about UTD, please
visit the university’s Web site at http://www.utdallas.edu/.