Professor Van Ry

Although they often operate at the margins, nearly 22 percent of the nation’s community colleges are minority-serving institutions and are responsible for enrolling about 55 percent of college-going minorities, according to a new report released by the Center for Minority Servings Institutions at the University of Pennsylvania.

The 11-page report titled, “On Their Own Terms: Two-Year Minority Serving Institutions,” outlines the important role that these MSIs — which include historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), tribal colleges and universities (TCUs), Hispanic-serving institutions (HSIs) and Asian American, Native American and Pacific Islander serving institutions (AANAPISIs) — have played in educating traditional and non-traditional age students.

“Given the nation’s changing demographics and it goals for increasing access to higher education, the influence and importance of MSI and community colleges are likely to expand in the community years,” said Thai-Huy Nguyen, a doctoral student in Penn’s Graduate School of Education and the lead author of the report.

Nguyen said that, despite the fact that many of these minority-serving institutions are clustered in areas that have some of the highest incomes in the country, they operate, on average, with “less resources than their four-year MSI and non-MSI community college counterparts.” <Read more.>

Via Jamal Eric Watson, Diverse Issues in Higher Education.