The Latino Lag

In this article, Deborah Santiago, vice president for policy and research at Excelencia in Education, was quoted as she discussed her professional knowledge and how it related to her personal experience in higher education.

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To Deborah Santiago, vice president for policy and research at Excelencia in Education, a Washington-based advocacy group for Hispanic students, "the challenge is to link aspiration, which is high, with actualization, which is low." She added: "If you are not working, and paying a school to take classes, those are economic costs for a family, and low-income families in every ethnic group face that economic challenge continually."

Also, many immigrant parents were not well educated in their home countries; 34 percent of foreign-born Hispanic adults have less than a ninth-grade education, according to Census data.

"One of the biggest predictors of educational attainment is the mother's education level," Ms. Santiago said. "If the mother doesn't have a good education, than the child is not going to have a good education." That means that college ambitions will not be on an immigrant family's front burner and, even if they are, parents may not understand the options available - like the ability of high-performing students to apply to selective out-of-town colleges or exploit scholarship programs.

Ms. Santiago, 41, the daughter of Puerto Rican migrants who settled in the Washington, D.C., area, recalled that "my parents didn't know what it would take to get to college," and in 1986 she chose the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Va., then a small liberal arts college, because a third cousin had attended.

"I figured it out on my own," she said.