Despite a recent national trend, North Park is exceeding its Latino student enrollment benchmarks. According to a report from The Education Trust, most private colleges and universities in the U.S. enroll disproportionately low numbers of Latino students despite the general growth of Latino undergraduates since 2000.
North Park is one of five institutions drastically exceeding their enrollment goal.
“Those are institutions where they had huge gains in Latino enrollment and they had major differences between the benchmark that they were supposed to hit and that enrollment,” said report author Sandra Perez. “So at these five institutions, we need to look at what they’re doing, how they’re doing it, and why students are applying to and enrolling at these institutions at higher rates than others.”
North Park is also a Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI). To become a federally designated HSI, an institution’s full-time undergraduate population must be at least 25% Hispanic or Latino.
With the designation, North Park can apply for federal funding opportunities only available to HSIs. So far, it has received such grants from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the National Science Foundation, among others.
Read more about the report here.