Professor Van Ry

The demographic changes sweeping the nation—especially the growth in the population of native-born young Hispanics—will have a profound impact on community-college enrollments and leadership in the years to come, experts told the 1,800 attendees on Thursday here at the annual meeting of the Association of Community College Trustees.

The Hispanic and Asian populations are now growing faster than the U.S. population as a whole, and the number of Hispanic students arriving at colleges, particularly community colleges, is on the rise, Mark Hugo Lopez of the Pew Research Center told the trustees, presidents, and other attendees at the four-day meeting, which concludes on Saturday.

In the future, most of the growth in the nation’s labor force will be made up of Hispanic workers, Mr. Lopez said. The Pew center does not make policy recommendations, he noted, but the data he presented made clear that, for two-year colleges, the challenge and opportunities will come from finding ways to serve a Hispanic population that is more diverse geographically than in the past. That’s because several Southern states, including Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, South Carolina, and Tennessee, are seeing surges in their Hispanic populations. <Read more.>

Via Goldie Blumenstyk, The Chronicle of Higher Education.