Elgin Community College (ECC) has seen significant improvements in the success of its LatinX students in recent years.
LatinX students, which comprise 42 percent of the Illinois college’s student population, still lag slightly behind white and Asian students, but they are nearly catching up, says Philip Garber, ECC’s vice president of planning, institutional effectiveness and technology.
The completion rate for LatinX students in the credit-bearing English 101 course, for example, increased from 51 percent to 56 percent between 2013 and 2017, he says. Persistence rates for LatinX students were significantly higher (about 63 percent) than that of African-American students (45 percent) in 2016, which is the most recent data.
LatinX students have also improved in overall completion over the past five years, Garber says. Because LatinX students are more likely to attend part-time, their completion rates are higher if looked at over a longer period – four or five years – rather than the typical three-year period used by the U.S. Education Department, he says.