Hispanic Higher Education Closing the Gap

THE University of Texas-El Paso (UTEP) is one of the most binational of America’s big universities. Some 90% of its students come from the borderplex—the Texan city of El Paso and its much larger sister-city, Ciudad Juárez, on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande. More than 70% of its students are Mexican or Mexican-American.
And that, in turn, means that the El Paso campus is rather different from the University of Texas’s flagship campus in Austin. More than half of UTEP students are among the first in their families to go to college, and roughly a third come from families with incomes below $20,000 a year. Diana Natalicio, UTEP’s president, says that for many of her students trouble at work, or an unexpected expense, can derail a whole year of college. UTEP tries to help, offering after-hours advice and instalment plans for tuition fees. Such measures have helped it to become one of the country’s leading sources of degrees for Hispanic students.
The Economist