Collegio Online

Issue date: 7/12/07 Section: Front Page

Media Credit: Courtesy photo From left, Anthony Moreno, Ilsi Umana and Cindy Perez, members of Hispanics of Today, celebrate Cinco de Mayo with music, dancing and historical information in 2005.

Cindy Perez remembers an instance at a party when she felt singled out because she spoke Spanish on the telephone. Someone had overheard her and was taken aback by it.
"Yes, I can speak Spanish," said Perez, junior in business management and marketing from Mexico.
That moment signified for Perez the problems that minorities can face on a college campus such as Pittsburg State University.
"We have to make our own opportunity to connect with our culture," said Perez. "It's easy for us to feel like we don't belong."
Another Hispanic student, Anthony Moreno, says the Hispanic student population is too small, making it harder to feel at home on campus.
"They need to change the way they recruit to reach Hispanic students," said Moreno, Mexican-American first-year graduate student in communication. "There is a language barrier, and PSU needs to change its approach."
Currently, the university does not have a specific recruitment technique for Hispanics, but recruitment is a tough area for all ethnic groups, says Eric Wilkinson, Office of Student Diversity.
"There is a need to recruit to the parents now, and with that are language and cultural barriers," said Wilkinson. "There are helicopter parents who have already been to college, and there are first generation parents whose children are the first to go."
But, says Wilkinson, the admissions office staff realizes that Hispanics are now the largest minority population in the United States.
"We know the population in the U.S. is changing and we're trying to see what we can do," he said.
With 44.3 million people, the Hispanic/Latino population accounts for 14.8 percent of the U.S. total. In Kansas, the group makes up 8.3 percent of the population.
At PSU, about 120 Hispanics were enrolled in the Fall 2006 semester, equaling 1.8 percent of total enrollment of 6,589.
Compare that to Emporia State University, which with an enrollment of 6,473 last fall, had 259 Hispanic students, or 4 percent.
But that's not the whole story, according to university records, which show steady improvements in Latino enrollment.

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