This is not at all a case of exaggerated hope and promise. Indeed, Texas' Latino community wants to be educated. This pertinent Dallas Morning News piece titled, "Only half of Latino college students graduate. What are Texas schools doing to help?", suggests as much. The problem is less one of college enrollment (although more needs to be done here, as well), but rather with college completion where they experience a significant gap relative to their white peers.
Financial aid is a very important factor in college completion, but also, particularly for first-generation students, other interventions like Summer bridge programs, regular access to advisers, mentors, and internship programs. Plus, they need to feel and experience a sense of belonging. Ethnic Studies departments and program help with this, but much more needs to be done since many students will not find themselves in these programs or classrooms.
This innovative approach at UNT Dallas that builds on neuroscience research creates a ‘Thirdspace’ for Teachers and School Leaders sounds promising, as well. For me, it suggest possible new frontiers for college student retention that we've not yet explored.
Sí se puede! Yes we can!
Angela Valenzuela
Texas Lawmakers Reminded of Declining White Population
By Ken Herman | Austin American-Statesman
February 22, 2019
Sometimes I think I have the easiest job in the world: Think up stuff. Type it. (Sometimes I skip the thinking part.) Then, I run into a job that seems even easier.
Here’s one: Texas demographer. The story’s been the same for decades. Our Hispanic population is growing rapidly. It’s a simple fact with complicated implications, a point reiterated at a Texas House County Affairs Committee hearing last week.
The numbers remain eye-opening, and the committee meeting came a few weeks after the Texas Demographic Center released preliminary population projections through 2050, when researchers expect there to be 47.4 million Texans, an astounding 88.3 percent increase over 2010.
“Our population projections suggest the Hispanic population will likely surpass the non-Hispanic white population in size by 2022,” researchers said.
The bottom line is what the bottom line has been for years. Our state legislators have been hearing versions of it for decades. At the committee meeting last week, Chairman Garnet Coleman, D-Houston, recalled how Pete Laney, when he chaired the State Affairs Committee in the latter 20th century, would bring in a demographer to make sure lawmakers understood what the future of Texas looked like, even back then.
I’m not sure the lesson took back then. It’s crucial that it takes now.
To that end, Coleman brought several experts in to teach it to his committee. Among the experts was Steve Murdock, the former Texas state demographer and former director of the U.S. Census Bureau. Murdock, backed by statistics, told the story of the Texas to come, which, under one projection assumption, shows the Hispanic population will grow from the 37.6 percent of the population it was in 2010 to 55.6 percent in 2050. Over the same period, our non-Hispanic white population will shrink from 45.3 percent to 21.8 percent.
“We are not coming back,” Murdock says of a non-Hispanic white majority of folks like himself. “Why do I say that with such certainty? Because when I look at the age structure, we are aging out of the reproductive periods of life.”
“The reason that’s important is that due to a variety of historical, discriminatory and other factors these demographic characteristics are tied to socioeconomic characteristics that are tied to the resources that people have to buy goods and services in the private sector,” Murdock said. “They’re tied to the resources that people have to pay taxes in the public sector. As we change our population, if we don’t change the socio-economics that go with our demographics ... we will be poorer and less competitive in the future than we are now.”
He noted that poverty rates for Hispanics and African-Americans are two to three times higher than for non-Hispanic whites.
The growth trends are irrefutable. Birth rates for non-Hispanic whites have been below the “replacement” rate for 25 years, according to Murdock. “And if you look at the world, where would we get that big infusion of non-Hispanic whites?”
I thought maybe Vermont. I was wrong.
Murdock was thinking Europe, where, he said, countries have declining population rates. So Europe is not the answer. And Murdock’s wife told him we’re very unlikely to produce lots more non-Hispanic whites here at home. “She said go out there and find those non-Hispanic white women who want to have four kids,” Murdock said. “She said they don’t want to sacrifice their career which, she’d argue, why should they compared to men?”
The projection for Travis County is similar, if a bit less pronounced than the statewide numbers. In 2010, Travis County was 50.5 percent non-Hispanic white and 33.5 percent Hispanic. One version of the 2050 projection shows Travis County will be 29.7 percent non-Hispanic white and 47.4 percent Hispanic.
We know the answer to the challenges of the reality of where Texas is headed demographically. And we have been making some, though not yet enough, progress on that front.
“We do know that education pays,” Murdock said. “It pays for every racial and ethnic group.”
Then, pausing for emphasis between words, he said: “Education is still the major way forward in terms of socioeconomic progress in the United States and in Texas.”
He summed up by reiterating the irrefutable truth, a truth our lawmakers must keep in mind as they tinker with our school system: “The future of Texas is tied to its minority populations. And how well they do, is how well we’re all going to do.”
(And, yes, we’re going to have to retool who we think of as “minority populations.”)
“One of the things that people sometimes overlook,” Murdock said, “is the fact that as a society, as a group, as a state or whatever you’re looking at, we all benefit from as many of us benefiting as much as possible.”
Education. It’s all about education — always has been, always will be — and the important truth that it’s a participatory activity, one that requires more than just taking money from some people to pay for schools for other people.
“Could those be wrong?” Murdock said of the projections. “Yes. Are they going to be reversed? No. You can come and kick dirt on my grave if I’m wrong, because by the time this happens, I’ll have been gone a long time. But we’re seeing this kind of change, and it means there are going to be changes required.”
We have been duly warned. Have been for years.
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