Comedian urges Hispanic students to stay in school - washingtonpost.com - 0 views
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One in five Hispanic teens drops out of high school, according to U.S. Education Department statistics. That's about twice the rate for black students and more than three times the rate among white students.
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Lindsay Andreas on 06 Nov 09I found this statistic about hispanic drop-out rates really alarming. Considering that the Hispanic population is quickly growing, education policy makers should be moving this to the forefront of their concerns.
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. "A lot of Latino students look at the sticker price and think, if my family makes $18-20,000 a year, I can't afford it," said Deborah Santiago, vice president of policy and research for Excelencia in Education, a Washington-based advocacy organization.
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This was something that I personally ran into in my practicum. Better information needs to be distributed regarding college financing. There is a stigma in lower-income areas about taking out college loans and a lot of misinformation. When I taught a lesson on saving and investment for an Economics class, I spent the majority of the lesson answering questions regarding this and reminding students that college is an investment and that it will pay-off in the end. An example that worked really well was the game of Life, since many students have played it. In the board game if you go to college in the beginning, you will end up in the better retirement home in the end.
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He told Wheaton students about a guidance counselor who encouraged him to go to college, and about his time at Loyola Marymount in Los Angeles, where he became disillusioned, started partying and stopped studying. "I went from being the first in my family to go to college to becoming another Latino statistic: a dropout," he said.
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Both parts struck me. Encouragement is so important, because if your teacher doesn't encourage you, who will after all? Second, a problem we have at McKinley is that students that go to college get distracted and overwhelmed by college and dropout the first year. This is important on two fronts, we need better college prep programs in high school and also the colleges and universities need better support systems for first generation college students.
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