Developing Local Models of Minority Student Success in College

When I was in college, my core group of friends was made up of mostly international students. Most of them were of Latino or European ethnicity and while they were considered “minority” students at school, they always stood out in a way that made the majority of students want to be a part of them. I was always envious of the way they seemed to treat each other like a big family, cooking traditional foods for each other, hosting the best parties on campus and always speaking in Spanish or Portuguese. (As time went on, I learned to figure out when they were talking about me and they would joke about how they needed to learn a new language to speak around me.)

This group of students, who hailed from countries such as Uruguay, Brazil, Peru, Argentina, Switzerland, Australia and France, probably would not have been the best of friends back in their hometowns. They were of different classes and customs and accents. It was the sport of tennis that brought them all to Nashville, TN for college and as teammates and visa-carrying students, they formed a bond that separated them from the rest of the suburban, middle-class majority at the college. But they were envied and were some of the most popular students on campus.

I am almost positive that it was this source of familiarity and support that kept at least a couple of the students coming back semester after semester. While several of the members had extremely outgoing and loquacious personalities, there were others that would have been completely lost in the crowd and left to fend for themselves in the confusing atmosphere of freshman college- not to mention the whole language barrier thing. Within this group of diverse ethnicities, there were personalities with even more diversity. But nonetheless, they were a family. And every single one of them graduated from the college in four years and most even remained in the US to work.

So what factors contributed to their success? Such was the topic of research by Raymond V. Padilla, Jesús Treviño, Kenny Gonzalez and Jane Treviño. Their study, entitled Developing Local Models of Minority Student Success in College, was designed to “reveal the strategies that successful minority students employ to overcome barriers to academic success in college” (page 125). Every year, too many minority students are failing to finish college because of a number of reasons. This study intended to discover ways to keep minority students in school until graduation and develop a model of successful ethnic minority students (page 126).

While I agree with their findings (which I will discuss later), I do not agree with the way they went about attaining their data. First of all, they only interviewed 28 students, all who attended the same university. The students were of several ethnicities, which would have it seem that all minorities feel the same way when starting college. I am sure that if they had interviewed a larger population, they would have found that there are different contributing factors within each individual ethnic group and even within in different genders and religions. Another issue I have with the students selected is that they were picked by staff members of the school. If the staff were aware of the reason for the study, they most likely would have picked the most familiar, outgoing and familiar students- students that may have different views from their more quiet counterparts. Students that are more outgoing will take more time to go out of their way to join clubs and meet friends. The shyer ones will usually have a tight nit group of friends and may even feel out of place within a large setting of even people of the same race. I believe that how one adapts to the college life has a lot to do with their personality, their ability to make fast friends and the support of family members back home. Of course, if a minority student goes to college and has a hard time meeting people, is quiet and lacks the support of their family, they will find it easier to just give up. But success in college shouldn’t be determined by the number of friends you have who are of the same race as you.

Data was collected by creating a matrix, a qualitative measurement used to interpret data in order to create a concept model (page 127). The results found were four barriers that minority students had to overcome in order to be successful in college. Discontinuity barriers are circumstances that one must overcome to feel comfortable in a new setting. Minority students come to college with the idea that they will be on their own, so they look to build a support system with peers who are in the same situation. They create a “family” just as my international friends had done. They depend on themselves and each other to help figure out the different customs or rules of college life.

One barrier that I disagree with to an extent is the resource barrier. While statistically, minority students come from poorer families than the majority, you can’t group an entire ethnicity or an entire minority by determining that these students will have to work harder and be more aware of the financial aid process. Plenty of the minorities at my school came from wealthy families and vise versa. I don’t think it is right to lump a whole group together. In fact, almost all of my minority friends came from wealthy families.

While it is easier for students of all races and ethnicities to cling to a group of their own kind, that isn’t what college is about. College is about forcing yourself out of your comfort zone and socializing and learning with people who are different from you. I think that as you advance in your college years, you tend to hang out with less of the same people all the time and attempt to branch out. While you always want to have that core group of friends you can go to for support and comfort, there is no reason why you can’t survive college by feeling out of place some of the time. It’s all about finding a balance and any student, regardless of color or class, that can do that, will be successful. By using this data, colleges that lack ethnic clubs or support systems can be aware of the needs of minority students and make sure there are some in place. But mixing with different groups at college will allow for a much more valuable learning and growing experience.