Success factors for Hispanic women students.

Intense cultural pressures often prevent Hispanic women from pursuing an education beyond high school. But a group of students at Texas Southmost College and the University of Texas at Brownsville are beating the odds and three researchers set out to discover why.

Dr. Brent Cejda, associate professor and Dr. Sheldon Stick, professor, both in educational administration at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and Dr. Nataliya Ivankova, associate professor in human studies at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, studied 63 Hispanic college students, both female and male. They reported their findings about female students at the University of Nebraska's Women in Educational Leadership conference held in Lincoln in October.

The study

Texas Southmost College, a community college enrolling about 8,000 students in Brownsville, has an articulation agreement with the University of Texas at Brownsville. Students can earn an associate's degree there first or enroll directly at the University of Texas at Brownsville. "Many Hispanic women would choose the community college option, but in terms of making the transfer from the two-year to four-year, it wasn't very effective," said Stick. The researchers wondered if it would be better if the women pursued the four-year degree from the start.

One glitch was that many of those who started at the community college were enrolled in vocational programs. After working for a while, they came back to earn a degree. "The community college gave them the confidence that they could do it," said Cejda.

Stick and Cejda interviewed the students from 30 to 45 minutes. The schools provided the participants, all of whom were U.S. citizens.

Of the 63 students, 36 were female. They were split between traditional and non-traditional aged students, with a few more falling into the 18-24 years category. Of the entire group, 29 were transfers into a four-year program while 34 had the four-year degree as their initial objective.