American families are having fewer children every year, and today’s young people plan to have even fewer in the future. This trend will worsen the enrollment crisis that is already hitting higher education institutions. Colleges lost 15 percent of their student population between 2010 and 2021, or about 2.7 million people, and are expected to lose another 15 percent by 2039. The Federal Reserve has found that around 60 schools are closing every year.
This is a dire situation, but there is one bright spot in the data. Amid the shrinking general population, Hispanic students accounted for 80 percent of the increase in degree attainment between 2017 and 2022. The number of Hispanic high school graduates is projected to increase by 16 percent by 2041.
Math suggests that serving Hispanic students well will be critical to the survival of the university system. Unfortunately, Donald Trump’s administration is not helping. As the Washington Monthly has covered in depth, the administration has moved to cut grant funding for federally recognized Hispanic-serving institutions (HSIs)—schools whose student bodies are at least 25 percent Hispanic—as part of its war against “DEI” in higher education.
Trump’s political attacks make it even more important to recognize and celebrate schools that are doing right by the all-important Hispanic student demographic. Contrary to the administration’s suggestion that HSIs are somehow discriminating against other (white) students, they are simply schools in heavily Hispanic areas of the country, serving the students who happen to enroll. As the overall university system increasingly relies on Hispanic enrollment, all colleges should take note of what is working at the top-performing HSIs.
That’s why the Monthly is proud to bring readers our second annual edition of the Best Colleges for Hispanic Students, in collaboration with the nonprofit Excelencia in Education. This ranking combines the accessibility focus of the Monthly’s college rankings with the deep knowledge that Excelencia has built over decades of studying the performance of Hispanic students and the schools that serve them. We use the D.C.-based organization’s data on the transfer and graduation rates of Hispanic students, which are a good approximation of how well schools serve them—and provide unique insight not available in other rankings of HSIs, which mostly rely on generalized data.
Excelencia gathers this information from the hundreds of HSIs that apply for its “Seal of Excelencia” award. Schools also submit data about diversity among faculty and staff, along with other metrics and descriptions of their programming, communications, and long-range planning around Hispanic education. To reflect those nuanced evaluations, we include in our ranking whether a school was awarded the seal. To those metrics, we added two accessibility measures from our own rankings: net price (the annual amount students pay when factoring in aid), and the percentage of students who receive Pell Grants.
Many of the top performers, like the University of Texas at El Paso (ranked number six among four-year schools) and California State University–San Bernardino (number seven), are favorites in the Monthly’s overall rankings (see our “Best Colleges for Your Tuition (and Tax) Dollars” lists. That’s no surprise—those schools have distinguished themselves for delivering a quality education at low cost to underprivileged student populations. Our number one ranked school is Pillar College in Newark, New Jersey. A private Christian school, Pillar has distinguished itself in our rankings through balance, achieving above-average scores across all our numerical metrics with no weak points. Pillar serves a predominantly low-income student population—70 percent of students receive Pell Grants—at a bargain price: Advertised annual tuition and fees are $25,900, but thanks to generous financial aid, scholarships, and grants, the average net price is just $8,024 per year. The school serves Hispanic students particularly well, leading them to graduate at a 60 percent rate, above the national average Hispanic graduation rate of 52 percent. This likely has something to do with the many dedicated programs Pillar offers for the Hispanic student population, including Programa BLEND (Bi-Lingual Entry Degree), which allows students to complete a two-year associate’s degree primarily in Spanish while taking English courses to prepare for bachelor’s completion.
A look at the geographic distribution of the colleges in our rankings underscores the absurdity of the Trump administration’s suggestion that HSIs are somehow discriminatory. In reality, they are reflections of the heavily Hispanic areas in which they are located. A whopping 13 of the top 30 schools are part of the California State, University of Texas, or Texas A&M systems, which boast strikingly low costs, solid graduation rates, and large numbers of students receiving Pell Grants. That includes number two ranked UT–Rio Grande Valley, a Seal of Excelencia winner whose 93 percent Hispanic student body pays an average net price of $5,282, and number four ranked CSU–Los Angeles in East L.A., another Seal of Excelencia winner, whose 78 percent Hispanic student body pays an average net price of $4,460 (the Hispanic graduation rate at both schools is about 50 percent, comparable to the national average). New York State is strongly represented as well. At number three ranked Boricua College, founded by Puerto Rican activists and scholars in gritty 1970s Brooklyn, a remarkable 86 percent of students receive Pell Grants, 77 percent of students are Hispanic, and 83 percent of those students graduate.
Florida and Illinois round out the top five states by Hispanic population size, and these also feature prominently in our rankings, accounting for 13 total schools. But Hispanic students in other parts of the country are not without good options. Sparsely populated New Mexico punches far above its weight, with seven colleges in our rankings. In the upper Midwest, Herzing University (number five) in Kenosha, Wisconsin, has a Hispanic graduation rate of 89 percent compared to 72 percent for the overall population—inverting the sizable gap between the national average graduation rates of non-Hispanic and Hispanic students. And in the Southeast, Dalton State College (number eight) cracks our top 10 mostly by virtue of its low net price ($5,625 a year) and freshly awarded Excelencia seal. Last fall, it became the first college in Georgia to earn that distinction.
We also rank two-year schools in a separate list, because of a methodological wrinkle: Given how often students at these institutions finish their degrees at other schools, we count transfers as a positive rather than a negative. The number one ranked Trinity Valley Community College system in Texas and number three ranked SABER College in Florida are the top performers on this metric; 100 percent and 94 percent of their respective Hispanic student populations either graduate or transfer. Victor Valley College in California claims the number two spot by combining a strong Hispanic graduation-transfer rate (77 percent) with an incredibly low average net price of just $1,947 per year. Miami Dade College, ranked number five, graduates or transfers 61 percent of Hispanic students, thanks largely to its Connect4Success program, which guarantees admission to Florida International University (number 33 in our four-year rankings) and gives students access to FIU advising while they complete their associate’s degree. Connect4Success participants are more likely to stick it out in community college, with fall-to-fall retention rates of 88 percent versus 65 percent for the overall student body. Since 2011, 80 percent of these participants have been Hispanic.
Connect4Success is just one of many programs at schools in our rankings that have delivered quantifiable academic benefits for Hispanic students. Other examples involve mentorship or support communities. At California State University–East Bay (number 48 in our four-year rankings), the Gaining Access ’N Academic Success program (“GANAS,” translating roughly to excitement or eagerness) immerses new community college transfer students in a cohort-based “learning community” replete with peer mentorship and specialized academic counseling. Transfer students who participate in GANAS have a 78 percent three-year graduation rate, compared with 66 percent for transfer students overall, and a 90 percent four-year graduation rate. At Mercy University (number 70) in Dobbs Ferry, New York, the Personalized Achievement Contract Program pairs students with a professional mentor to help students gain financial literacy skills, discuss career exploration, and generally prepare for life beyond college. Before the 2009 implementation of PACT, which is open to and encouraged for all Mercy students, Hispanic students had a 60 percent retention rate and 27 percent graduation rate. By 2018, those numbers had improved to 77 percent and 42 percent, according to data from Excelencia.
Our rankings also illuminate the potential of what we might call the service-oriented pre-professional program, which gives students a sense of purpose as well as a pathway to a good career. Take the Advancing Nutrition Development through Alliance for Education and Leadership (ÁNDALE) program at California State University–Long Beach (number 30). Targeted at underrepresented students in health-related majors, ÁNDALE provides classroom training and hands-on research experience in nutrition and chronic disease prevention, equipping a new generation of health professionals to tackle the high rates of obesity, diabetes, cancer, and other chronic conditions prevalent in the Hispanic/Latino population. According to Excelencia data, between 2021 and 2024, Latino ÁNDALE participants achieved substantially higher cumulative GPAs (3.56–3.77) than other Latino students in CSULB’s College of Health & Human Services (3.22–3.32), and 100 percent of participants graduated or remained on track to graduate. This success is partly a function of “students’ upbringing, how they’ve struggled and how they want to give back,” Melawhy Garcia, a health science professor who directs the program, told me. “Students will say, ‘When I was a child my parents didn’t have the tools, we didn’t have the money, we had low-quality food.’ So a lot of their motivation comes from trying to give back to their communities.”
The Spanish Community Translation and Interpreting Program at the University of Texas–Arlington (number 87) is a similar success story. Like ÁNDALE, this program combines classroom training with real-world experience; in this case, the latter comes through providing English-Spanish translation and interpreting services in high-stakes settings like immigration law nonprofits and hospitals. Students “feel really great about contributing to people in need and providing a service that these people cannot pay for,” says Alicia Rueda-Acedo, a professor in UTA’s department of modern languages and the program’s director. The numbers back her up. The four-year graduation rate of Hispanic students in the program is 88 percent, about 20 percentage points higher than the overall Hispanic graduation rate at UTA (69 percent). The program also offers a dedicated academic major, which has grown eightfold since its launch in 2014, despite drastically declining enrollment in language programs across the country.
As students have benefited from the Spanish Community Translation and Interpreting Program, so too has the greater Dallas community. Since the program’s inception, students have collaborated with more than 25 nonprofit organizations, providing more than 10,000 hours of translation and interpreting services. And while not all students go on to become translators or interpreters, the skills they learn help them contribute to their region in other ways. “I have students who decided to go into the health area after taking the medical translation course, or they say, ‘I want to be a social worker,’ or they realize they want to be a legal assistant,” Rueda-Acedo told me. “I hear that and say, ‘I’m glad that you discovered your real passion in this program, and that this program also helped you to be a strong candidate in those areas, because you can professionally translate and interpret.’”
This is HSIs at their best: synergistic ecosystems where cultural identity, language skills, and a commitment to service reinforce one another. The benefit that accrues to local communities is a powerful illustration of how much is at stake in the Trump administration’s campaign against HSIs. The benefit to students, meanwhile, is something other colleges cannot afford to ignore. To survive the next decade, they will need to serve an expanding and often underprivileged student population that is being singled out by the current administration for political attacks. The schools in these rankings provide models for how to do so well.
