Commentary

Abstract

The past century has seen U.S. higher education shift from providing education to a small group of students in historically “elite” institutions, to offering nearly universal postsecondary education, to the most demographically diverse group of students ever, in the most diverse range of institutional types in the world (Thelin, 2013; Trow, 1970). This growth in higher education enrollment and attainment has arguably been the most important factor to strengthen the U.S. economy during this time (Goldin & Katz, 2009). Because other countries’ rates of postsecondary educational attainment have recently surpassed those of the United States, raising postsecondary attainment has become a key national goal that will likely remain a priority in educational research for the next century.

Achieving this goal will be impossible without addressing recent demographic transformations. Advancing the educational success of the Latinx population can significantly affect overall postsecondary attainment since Latinxs comprise the largest and fastest growing non-White population in the country yet historically have among the lowest rates of postsecondary attainment (Kelly, Schneider, & Carey, 2010). Reflecting the significant institutional stratification in U.S. higher education enrollment by race/ethnicity and income (e.g., Carnevale & Strohl, 2013), Latinx postsecondary students are concentrated in less selective four-year institutions and community colleges that tend to have lower graduation rates. Even further, 62% of Latinx students are currently enrolled in Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs) (Excelencia in Education, 2016). These federally designated institutions are mostly broad access and are largely unrecognized in current research, despite the fact that they constitute a significant proportion of postsecondary institutions. Instead, as Deil-Amen (2015) notes, the majority of higher education scholarship has historically focused on the most selective and elite institutions. To illustrate, although almost half of undergraduate students are enrolled in community colleges (American Association of Community Colleges, 2015), just 18% of articles on community colleges have been published in top-tier higher education journals (Crisp, Carales, & Nuñez, 2016). This imbalance has led Deil-Amen (2015) to characterize broad access institutions as the “marginalized majority” among U.S. postsecondary institutions.

Arguably, HSIs constitute a critical part of the “marginalized majority,”¹ yet they contribute significantly to Latinx postsecondary attainment, graduating an estimated 40% of Latinx bachelor’s degree recipients and 54% of those earned in the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math fields (Harmon, 2012; Hixson, 2009). Garcia’s work advances research on this “marginalized majority” of institutions. Extending more recent work on institutional and demographic characteristics of HSIs (e.g., Núñez, Crisp, & Elizondo, 2016), Garcia’s research focuses on HSIs as organizations, providing a corrective to the tendency of higher education research on HSIs to focus on the individual student as the sole unit of analysis (Stevens, 2015).

As Garcia notes, the central question that researchers, policymakers, and HSI leaders are grappling with today is, “How do HSIs serve Latinx students?” Focusing on organizational identity provides an essential lens to identify how various actors (e.g., faculty, students, administrators) make sense of their status navigating an HSI. Garcia builds a rich corpus of data through interviews, observations, document analysis, and analyses of graduation rates. Through this process, she provides a more nuanced view of organizational identity, which can yield informed “ground measures” (Deil-Amen, 2015) of organizational identity and behavior.

Adding the dimension of organizational culture advances our understanding of HSIs beyond the traditional binary framing of “Latinx-enrolling” versus “Latinx-serving,” in which student outcomes (typically graduation rates) are interpreted to be the sole indicators of whether HSIs are “serving” Latinx students. A lens of organizational culture suggests that institutions that produce high numbers of Latinx graduates may not necessarily be “Latinx-serving” when the organizational identity does not authentically focus on serving Latinx students. In sum, Latinx-producing does not mean the same thing as Latinx-serving.

Conversely, the findings also reveal that HSIs that do not have high Latinx graduation rates can still have actors who are focused on addressing the needs of Latinx students, thereby making them “Latinx-enhancing” institutions. The organizational identity is also characterized by “serving” Latinx students, just not in the single metric of graduation rates.² This possibility invites us to consider and recognize multiple measures of serving that go beyond traditional and individually based indicators of student success. Such measures include social factors like a positive racial campus climate, community engagement, and support programs to help students succeed. Other research indeed corroborates that HSIs cultivate these factors in distinctive ways (e.g., Cortez, 2015; Cuellar, 2014; Hurtado & Ruiz Alvarado, 2015; Núñez, Hoover, Pickett, Stuart-Carruthers, & Vázquez, 2013).

This piece makes three critical contributions by (a) strengthening the representation of the “marginalized majority” of institutions in educational research, (b) focusing on the organization as the unit of analysis, and (c) identifying dimensions of organizational identity grounded in rigorous empirical research. In the coming years, researchers should follow its lead by studying historically overlooked types of institutions and examining organizations as the primary units of analysis. Doing so can reveal elements of organizational identity and behavior that might be amenable to change so that institutional actors can develop more informed strategies for facilitating student success (Bensimon & Bishop, 2012).

Finally, this research has policy implications for accountability in education. It indicates that “serving” Latinx students cannot be reduced to a single metric of “graduation rates” but must also include dimensions of organizational identity and behavior. Future studies can identify additional measures of “serving” Latinx students and offer multiple metrics to assess institutional performance in this regard. In short, this research has immense potential to advance equitable postsecondary attainment during a time of considerable demographic transformation.

Footnotes

Notes

Anne-marie Núñez is an associate professor of Higher Education and Student Affairs at The Ohio State University, 310F Ramseyer Hall, 29 W. Woodruff Ave., Columbus, OH 43210; e-mail: Nunez.80@osu.edu . Her research examines equity in postsecondary education for historically marginalized communities. Recent work has focused on the higher education trajectories of Latinx, first-generation, English learner, and migrant students. A scholar of Hispanic-Serving Institutions, she co-edited the award-winning book, Hispanic-Serving Institutions: Advancing Research and Transformative Practice, the first book to focus on Hispanic-Serving Institutions as organizations.

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