Graduation Texas Initiative Gears Up for ENGAGE™ Administration

Only 16 percent of Latino adults in Texas have an associate degree or higher, compared to 33 percent of the total working-age population in the state.

A staff member at The University of Texas–Pan American advises a student. UTPA is one of several Texas colleges working to help improve retention and graduation rates among Latino students.

Fourteen postsecondary institutions in Texas have committed to improving this statistic. They are partnering with ACT, Excelencia in Education, the ACT Texas State Council and Organization, and the Texas Business and Education Coalition to increase retention and graduation rates among Texas Latino college students.

As participants in the “Graduation Texas: Engage, Advise, Retain, and Graduate” initiative, institutions will use ACT’s ENGAGE College assessment to identify and intervene on behalf of Latino students who are at risk of dropping out or failing classes. ENGAGE is a research-based non-cognitive assessment that helps institutions improve their student retention rates by evaluating first-year students’ psychosocial attributes, determining their levels of academic risk, and helping connect students to interventions to help them persist in their studies and achieve academic success.

Excelencia in Education research shows that if the United States is to regain the top ranking in the world for college degree attainment, Latinos must earn 3.3 million additional degrees by 2020. Texas has the second largest Latino population in the United States—38 percent— and projections show a continued increase. Nearly half of the state’s K–12 students are Latino.

“The relative youth, growth, and current levels of educational attainment among Latinos show that our nation will not return to world leadership in college completion without a tactical plan focused on increasing Latino degree attainment,” said Sarita Brown, president of Excelencia in Education. “Nationally, Latinos will have to almost triple the number of degrees currently earned to reach the goal by 2020. As a state with a large population of Latinos, Texas is vital to America’s future.”

More than a dozen postsecondary institutions in Texas have partnered with ACT and other organizations to ensure that more Latino students graduate from college.

The partners kicked off Graduation Texas last fall in San Antonio with a Higher Education Success Seminar that highlighted best practices in student advising. Since then, ACT has helped participating institutions develop plans for administering ENGAGE and connecting academic resources to student needs, is working to train advisors to use ENGAGE, and is conducting a pilot survey of student resource use. This fall, ACT will provide up to 500 ENGAGE College assessments for each institution to administer to first-time, first-year Latino college students.

ACT research has shown that ENGAGE increases an institution’s ability to detect academic risk by as much as 50 percent. “We know that identifying students during their freshman year and counseling them effectively will put them on the path to college completion,” said Karen Pennell, ACT assistant vice president and regional manager. “Our data make it clear that advising services will be especially important to help ensure success for Latino students.”

Latino students in Texas are the recipients of the new “Graduation Texas: Engage, Advise, Retain, and Graduate” initiative geared at helping them stay and succeed in college.

The institutions will use ENGAGE results to refer students identified as at risk to advisors who will help them create action plans that include appropriate campus resources.

ACT and Excelencia in Education will use the data collected to examine the relationships between academic risk factors, resource utilization, and retention rates of entering Latino students at two-year and four-year Texas institutions with high Latino enrollment. ACT will also survey students to learn about their use and perceptions of resources, such as advising, study skill workshops, study groups with peers, and conversations with faculty about academic work.

“We anticipate an increased understanding of how student advising practices and support resources impact academic success for Latino students in postsecondary settings,” said Pennell. “We also expect to see increased rates of academic success and retention among the Latino students participating in the study, and better defined and focused intervention programs for Latino students.”