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When Carlos Sanchez immigrated to Grand Rapids, Michigan, from Mexico City 25 years ago, he’d already completed two years of college at Universidad Iberoamericana, and he was determined to finish his degree. Already bilingual, he felt comfortable tackling the second half of his education in English. But the language barrier was only part of the challenge.
When he tried to enroll, he found that colleges had no idea how to handle his international transcripts and credentials. He recalls finding (and paying a considerable amount for) an outside company that could convert his transcripts into something more comparable to the U.S. education system.
Eventually, Davenport University recognized the academic work he’d done in Mexico and he was able to finish his bachelor’s degree in international business there, without having to start from scratch.
Sanchez is now the executive director of Casa Latina, a new bilingual college program at Davenport that will cater to students exactly like the one he was 25 years ago. He hopes it will help many highly trained or qualified people who are underemployed because they believe their English isn’t good enough to earn a college degree.
“I’ve been here 25 years and I’ve met engineers that are Uber drivers,” he said. “I’ve met accountants that have worked on a manufacturing line. Not that there’s anything wrong with those positions, but these individuals have four-plus years of college in their countries and they are underutilized.”
Beginning this fall, Casa Latina will offer 12 online undergraduate and graduate programs in an entirely bilingual and bicultural format. The curriculum will be offered entirely in Spanish one week and entirely in English the next, and all support services will be available in both languages.
Davenport’s tuition prices will apply to the Casa Latina programs, but accepted students will be awarded scholarships of $9,200 per year to help make the program more accessible financially. Those enrolled part time will receive a proportionate amount of scholarship funding, Sanchez said. Students are eligible for the scholarship award regardless of their immigration status, which Davenport does not ask about, he said. If students are eligible for federal financial aid, they can also use that funding to pay tuition.
Once students are accepted, Sanchez said, Davenport will assess their education and work experience to see what can count toward degree progressions. The idea is to help students finish their education as efficiently and affordably as possible and get them into the workforce so they can provide better lives for their families.
Latinos are the fastest growing demographic group in the United States, but data shows they are less likely than other racial and ethnic groups to have earned a college diploma. About 23 percent of Latino adults between the ages of 25 and 29 have a bachelor’s degree, compared to 45 percent of their white peers, according to a 2022 Pew Research Center report.
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Davenport, like colleges across the country, has struggled with declining undergraduate enrollment since the pandemic. It has six campuses in Michigan along with its online program. In the 2018-2019 academic year, the university enrolled 6,763 undergraduate students, compared to 5,372 in the 2021-2022 academic year (the most recent year available from the National Center for Education Statistics). And colleges across the country are bracing for a shrinking number of graduating high schoolers after 2025 to have an effect on their enrollment.
But Davenport’s president, Richard J. Pappas, said that the college has had good enrollment for the last three semesters, and the Casa Latina program is not just about boosting those numbers.
“It’s not a recruiting tool. Because if we don’t retain them and graduate them, this is a failure,” Pappas said.
About 7 percent of Davenport’s undergraduate students identify as Hispanic or Latino, and 34 percent as nonwhite, according to data from the Department of Education.
Deborah Santiago, president of the national advocacy group Excelencia in Education, said she’s excited about Casa Latina because it is advancing what it means to support not only Latino students but Latino communities more broadly.
For these students to thrive in college and afterwards, Santiago said, the bilingual curriculum has to be connected to services that support students’ lives outside the classroom and resources that help them prepare for the workforce.
“There is intentionality, there’s leadership here,” she said of the Davenport program. “They see the Latino community, they want to connect them to employment, they want to make sure that they get the academic rigor.”
Pappas said Davenport has worked with state and local Hispanic business leaders to make sure that Casa Latina is an opportunity for higher education and career development for “people who don’t feel comfortable, who may feel like they’re not capable because of the language barrier.”
Degree programs to be offered include accounting, business administration, education, human resource management, health services administration and technology project management.
Latino adults with work experience or some higher education in their home country are one of three demographic groups that Davenport expects to serve with this new program. Another is the college-aged children of those immigrants, who speak Spanish at home but are English dominant, and who have not yet harnessed their Spanish skills in academic or professional settings.
Sanchez said they also expect to serve non-Latino students who attended immersion programs in high school, are bilingual and want to develop Spanish-language proficiency in their field of study and prepare to work as fully bilingual professionals.
Regardless of their backgrounds, Pappas said he thinks that having a bilingual degree will help set these students apart in the workforce.
“We still have some heavy lifting to make sure we do it well,” Pappas said. “But I think it’s going to have a big impact, not only on the people who go to our program, but the places that employ them.”
This story about bilingual college was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.
Universities like Davenport should stop enabling illegal immigration, and businesses that employ illegal immigrants should face sanctions for evading American law. The U.S. higher education sector is already overgrown, so law-evading institutions like this should have their accreditation revoked and be allowed to go out of business, while their staff should consider emigrating to Latin America, which could definitely benefit from better higher education opportunities in their own nations.