Latino Higher Education Group Launches College-completion Campaign

With a sizable list of partner organizations, the Excelencia in Education advocacy group embarked Wednesday upon what organization leaders described as a "quest" for solutions and policy changes that will help improve college completion rates among United States' growing Latino population over the next decade.

What is distinct about the initiative is that it claims that goal cannot be reached unless there is a concerted and deliberate effort to identify and expand the use of tactics and strategies that have been proven to work with getting more Latino youths to and through college.

Sarita Brown, president of Excelencia in Education, likened the initiative to a capital campaign.

"But our resource is people," Brown said Wednesday at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. "This is a human-capital campaign."

To help set the stage for the initiative, Excelencia released two reports in tandem that deal with Latino college-completion rates.

The first was Ensuring America's Future: Benchmarking Latino College Completion to Meet National Goals: 2010 to 2020.

Based on the report, that means 3.3 million more Latinos than are projected to earn degrees between now and then will have to complete college.

"When we saw that we need to make sure we have 5.5 million degrees for Latinos to help meet our goal, we thought that was a really a solid number that we could talk about," said Deborah Santiago, vice president of Excelencia. "This is where we can keep our attention."

The other report is titled Ensuring America's Future: Federal Policy and Latino College Completion. This report examines how existing programs at the federal level impact or influence Latino completion rates. The report notes, for instance, that Hispanics represent 19 percent of TRIO students.