Culture Cues: Research with Latino Students in Colorado

Dancers in Southern Colorado

Recently, I’ve been privileged with several culture excavation projects. One of them was for Pikes Peak Community College’s (PPCC) strategic goal to increase its Latino enrollment and ultimately become an official Hispanic Serving Institution. In Colorado, our Latino population is 21%. However, our largest local school district has 30% Latino population and some of the other high schools are as high as 66% Latino.

To prepare PPCC’s Marketing Department for effective outreach to the Latino market, we did secondary research, interviewed community influencers, conducted bilingual focus groups with Latino high school students, and interviews in Spanish with parents. We learned things like this:

• The immigrant experience is a salient as 53% of adults report being foreign born.
• Mexican and Central American immigrants arrive in the U.S. the least educated with between 46-57% having less than a high school degree.
• Students and teachers reported that parents often work long days six days a week. This, in addition to their own education levels might prevent parents from helping students navigate their post-high school plans.
• Although they want their children to “do better” and “have good jobs,” many parents have limited notions of the actual scope of professional career options and may think only of obvious options like “lawyer or doctor.”
• Students reported playing the public face of the family, e.g. handling phone calls, translating paperwork for their parents.
• Many students are not only bilingual but become adept at code-switching between cultures. They develop highly attuned soft skills, but might feel caught in the middle, E.g., trying to fit in at school while “trying to prove how Mexican I am to my family.”
• Students reported feeling pressure to succeed in order to make their parents sacrifices “worth it” or be an example for younger siblings.
• Some students were already working 30-40 hours a week in addition to schoolwork.
• Strong family systems and loyalties mean students—even highly qualified students—are less likely to go far from home. Latinos are the most likely to attend a two-year college at 48% compared to 30% of Caucasians.
• No one in our groups had heard the term “Latinx.” Secondary research suggests that many Latinos outside of higher education do not like the term for a variety of reasons. Also, many use their country of origin as a self-identifier (e.g. “Honduran” rather than “Latino”) although this softens over generations as families become acculturated and intermarry.

PPCC has hired a dedicated bilingual recruiter who is well-connected with community influencers and partners on information sessions for students and families. We translated the viewbook and recommended ways to simplify and translate key financial aid and immigration sections of the website. We also discussed a media channel mix for Spanish-speaking parents as well as the (different) channels better suited to their bilingual students.

If you have an upcoming project that would benefit from an enhanced understanding of a population segment’s cultural lens, please drop me a line. ​