President Donald Taylor proposed increasing Latino enrollment as a necessary step to continuing the college’s mission and ability to grow.
It has been more than a year since Taylor announced his 2020 plan, and the campus faculty and staff have started to take steps towards achieving those goals. One of the most significant factors for Taylor was for Cabrini to be a more diversified campus, specifically targeting Latino student enrollment to grow to 25 percent.
“There’s been projected a large demographic decline of the number of traditional students graduating from high school,” Taylor said. “In this whole region there’s about an 18 percent projected decline in the number of high school graduates over a 10-year-period.”
“There are certain populations that are increasing right now that are increasing rather than declining,” Taylor said. “We needed to be in those markets.”
The Cabrini community seems to be receiving the news about the Latino enrollment goal well, but there have been questions about why this goal was created.
“It’s part of where the demographics in the United States are right now. If you look at the demographics of every other 18-year-old the numbers are going down but for Latino communities the numbers are going up so it makes sense for us to be recruiting,” Dr. Gingerich, Provost and Vice-President for Academic Affairs, said.
“Mother Cabrini and the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart founded the school to serve immigrants,” Taylor said. “Now the fastest growing population of immigrant students are Latinos.”
Not only does this goal enable Cabrini to continue to follow its mission, but it can also help monetarily.
“If you become an HSI (Hispanic Serving Institution), meaning your incoming class has reached 25 percent (Hispanic), your institution is available to get significant additional financial aid from the federal government to support Latino students,” Taylor said.
Reaching the students that are a part of the Latino community has meant hiring new faculty and staff to focus on making them feel welcomed to the Cabrini community and take an interest in the school and its mission.
“The first step that the school had taken was hiring (multicultural recruiters),” Angelica Martinez, multicultural recruiter of partnerships in the admissions office, said.
Sandra Vasquez, the multicultural recruiter who works with students directly in the admissions office, was also hired to help Taylor and the college as a whole reach the enrollment goal.
“I try to seek other partnerships within the community primarily focusing on schools and organizations,” Martinez said. “They’re usually non-profit organizations that service low income hispanic students.”
These are not the only partnerships that have been made to help achieve the goal. There have been regional and national partnerships from the business side too with one of the big names being Al Dia, a Hispanic newspaper that covers Cabrini events and Taylor writes for as a guest writer.
With a declining population of baby boomers in the workforce leaving jobs unfilled and the decline in high school graduation demographics, Taylor is determined to see this goal through.
“If the universities don’t step up to educate and graduate where the students are increasing to meet those jobs, then the state is going to have a major problem,” Taylor said.
