Insights on Why So Few Latina Youth Are Going to College

In this important Teachers College Record article, Linda Harklau (University of Georgia) tells the story of Izzie, a young Latina who, despite being identified as gifted in sixth grade, attending upper-track classes in middle school, doing well in high school, and showing every sign of being qualified and capable of succeeding in college, didn’t go. What accounts for this missed opportunity, which is so common among Latina youth? Is it mostly cultural pressure to take on traditional roles as wives and mothers?

Not so, says Harklau. These young women’s decisions, “far from representing a retreat into traditional women’s roles, might in some cases represent emergent feminism and a means of contesting and remaking those roles.” Getting a job and becoming independent has greater appeal, and “aspects of college often assumed to be liberating and empowering to women may not be so for a working-class immigrant youth.” Izzie’s mother was adamant that if Izzie went to college, she would live at home. “For Izzie, college offered only the perpetuation of her house-bound, surveilled, and disciplined status as a female child of the household for four more years,” says Harklau, “relegated to the bottom of her family’s domestic hierarchy in which income earners (both male and female) were privileged.” College expenses would also be scrutinized and continue Izzie’s dependence on the family.

Getting a job, on the other hand, was a de facto “feminist project” for Izzie. It would be a “family-sanctioned way to fight family strictures on her behavior and the double standard she perceived in her family’s domestic hierarchy,” says Harklau. And that’s what Izzie did – she passed up college, got a job, and reveled in her newly independent status within her home.

“Izzie’s story could be seen as a warning bell for educators hoping to boost immigrant Latina participation in higher education,” concludes Harklau. There are several clear implications: better college counseling, outreach to the family, especially the mother, mentors who can communicate the options more effectively, and financial aid and work-study to give college students more independence from their families. 

“Why Izzie Didn’t Go to College: Choosing Work Over College as Latina Feminism” by Linda Harklau in Teachers College Record, January 2013 (Vol. 115, #1, p. 1-32), 

http://www.tcrecord.org/Content.asp?ContentId=16743 

From the Marshall Memo #469