This Sunday April 12th at 3pm we launch season 5 of Living Smart with Jeff Yeager, the Ultimate Cheapskate on living more with less. We aired our first Living Smart show on October of 2005 and we have come a long way since then. We are now on 113 PBS channels across the nation and the show serves a need for information that can empower the audience in different areas of life.
As we learn to live more with less, enjoying life more without depending on a big salary, and becoming resilient in difficult times, I can't help but become concerned with the latest information I have read about Latinos and higher education. Latinos are the fastest growing ethnic group and the least likely to enroll in college. Why does this concern me particularly in Houston? Half of our population is Latino and if we are not educating our Latino youth properly or well enough to get them into college, we can't expect a robust economic development, the kind we need to keep our economy strong, diverse and our middle class strong and thriving.
We know Latinos from low income families are the least likely to enroll in college, so now that we know this. What can we do about it?
There are a lot of programs to help Hispanics make it into college but they are not widespread or systemic. They remain piecemeal and thus ineffective to read the volume of students we need to reach.
The Houston Chronicle reported just 42.5 percent of Hispanics graduated from highschool in 2007 enrolled in college or technical training. This is just not good enough. In fact, it is dismal.
Today 20 percent of students at the University of Houston (the largest university in town) are Hispanic. This is an improvement but Latino students are facing the biggest hurdle ever, money and the way the economy is going, that is not meant to get any better.
We always like to focus on solutions to the problem, but until we realize as a city and a state we need a better way, there is no end in sight.
We will most likely discuss this topic on our next town forum. In the mean time, make suggestions. I like a quote that might help us with this. "There is no stopping an idea whose time has come."
I hope that idea is how do we as a city, and a state with a very large Latino population, educate our youth for the future. This is not about blame. I am not asking why I am asking how do we do it.
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1 comment:
What worked for me and for Dr. Ben Carson is to start with turning off the televisin(Internet), work hard (take challenging subjects from tough but very good teachers), read two books per week in the summer and give your mother or father (or both) a book report, benefit from parents who talk to the teachers once a month, volunteer with the PTO and ALWAYS go to the meetings, get your children involved with other children and their parents who believe that - as Jesus said shortly before he was murdered - you can perform miracles far beyond mine. And every single day be sure that he or she knows that life is about decisions, it is precious and short, that it should be filled with love and passion and commitment and that - if he or she wants to, works hard enough and believes, that they can do anything. But for sure they should be a blessing to the universe because there are many that need their help. Just a start. Love!
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