Dreaming big when options are few
Why do so many Latino male students decide to enlist in the military instead of going to college? A new study explores the reasons.
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Many people today believe college is an option available to anyone who wants a bachelor’s degree. After all, even if your high school didn’t adequately prepare you for higher education, you can transfer your way to a four-year institution by first going to community college. And if you’re short on funds, you can apply for state and federal financial aid.
The problem is, quite a few high school students don’t even know community colleges exist—or that financial aid options are available.
That’s one of the concerning findings of a research paper recently published in Education and Urban Society. The authors—Adrian Huerta, Provost Postdoctoral Scholar at the USC Pullias Center for Higher Education, and Eligio Martinez Jr., clinical assistant professor at Claremont Graduate University—interviewed a handful of young Latino men from working class backgrounds who had served in the military before pursuing higher education—and found the majority of these men hadn’t been told about, much less encouraged to pursue, the many college-going possibilities and opportunities available to them when they were high school students.
“What we found is that Latino male high school students weren’t considered college material. Most of the Latino males in our study said they were made to feel irrelevant because they were simply ignored by their high school counselors,” said Huerta. “Even some of the students with fairly strong academic records in high school weren’t given the college knowledge and support to pursue any higher education. So, this paper really pushes against the tendency of counselors and teachers to unfairly categorize students as either ‘college material’ or ‘not college material,’ and focuses on how Latino males are neglected by school systems.”
Passive discouragement to pursue college on the part of the schools pushed the young men in this study to pursue other options, which were often limited in the working-class neighborhoods they lived in. Motivated to build lives and careers that pushed past those limits, these men chose to join the military, which promised career opportunities and guaranteed benefits—including a way to pay for college in the future.
“Coming from families where many of the men worked manual labor or low wage jobs, these young men saw the military as their best option for upward social mobility,” Huerta explained.
Huerta said that to encourage more Latino males to pursue college, high schools need to start educating all students about financial aid, community colleges, and other readily-available resources, instead of creating a “culture of exclusivity” that reserves that knowledge for students taking AP and honors courses.
“The military did provide the men we interviewed with the opportunity to eventually pursue higher education with financial support from the G.I. Bill,” Huerta said. “That’s a positive outcome. But we’re trying to point out that the military shouldn’t seem like the one and only option for moving up the socioeconomic ladder, as it did for these men.”
This study continues Huerta’s long-term research on boys and men of color, college access and equity, and vulnerable populations in higher education.
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Martinez, Jr., E., & Huerta, A. H. (2018). Deferred enrollment: Chicano/Latino males, social mobility and military enlistment. Education and Urban Society. https://doi.org/10.1177/0013124518785021