Latino Male College Enrollment in the Wake of COVID-19: Revisiting Postsecondary Pathways Five Years Later

• In Event: Designing, Defending, and Sustaining Equity for Communities of Color in Politically Hostile Climates

Abstract

While Hispanic college enrollment has increased steadily over the last two decades, Latino males continue to trail behind their peers in both college enrollment and degree attainment. The COVID-19 pandemic sharply disrupted enrollment trends nationwide, with a severe impact on Latino males, especially in the community college sector. Framed by Perna’s (2006) college choice framework and informed by recent literature on post-pandemic inequality, this study investigates how Latino male enrollment compares across institutional sectors and demographic groups. Specifically, we revisit a national analysis first conducted in 2018 by examining updated data from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) and the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center (NSCRC) to assess how enrollment patterns for Latino males have evolved five years after the onset of the pandemic.
Using logistic regression, we examine whether Latino males are more likely to enroll in two-year rather than four-year institutions, incorporating student-level predictors, state-level contextual factors, and interaction terms to assess intersectional effects. Preliminary analyses suggest that Latino male enrollment has not fully returned to pre-pandemic levels. We observe a clear decline in Latino male enrollment during the peak pandemic years of 2020 to 2022, with the steepest drops occurring in the community college sector. Additionally, we find widening gender gaps in both two-year and four-year enrollment, with Latinas rebounding more quickly than their male peers. Latino males also appear more likely than White, Black, or Asian males to enroll in two-year institutions and less likely to access four-year pathways—supporting the expectation that institutional type remains a key stratifier in college access. These patterns align closely with our hypotheses and suggest that Latino males continue to face structural disadvantages in their college trajectories. By controlling for relevant demographic and contextual variables, we expect to demonstrate that these disparities persist even when accounting for individual-level factors, highlighting the salience of institutional and systemic influences on Latino male enrollment.
Our findings underscore the need to design intentional and data-driven interventions that specifically target Latino male students, not only at the point of access but also along the transfer and completion pipeline. This urgency is heightened by the current political environment, in which narratives denying racial and gender inequalities threaten to undermine long-standing efforts to close educational opportunity gaps and increasingly cast equity-focused interventions as divisive or unnecessary. Our objective is to challenge these narratives by illustrating how persistent structural barriers shape Latino male college trajectories and by identifying actionable strategies that postsecondary institutions and policymakers can adopt to foster equitable access and completion.

Authors

• Victor B. Sáenz, University of Texas at Austin

• Luis Ponjuan, Texas A&M University

• Rodrigo Aguayo, University of Texas at Austin