Differences in Education Among Whites and Latinos

Coming into college, there was always the talk of ACT scores and grades that some classmates and I got coming out of high school. There was a very interesting pattern that I noticed when talking to people from different areas, and more importantly, different races. I spoke to some of my Hispanic friends, some of my white friends, and a couple of Asian friends. Just in random conversation, we began talking about how well we did in school, and some of the better scores that people in their classes got. Of course, there were those who were extremely smart, and then there were those who were not so smart.

            To start, I came into college thinking I had a fairly good ACT score, with a composite of 24. As I spoke to my roommate, he began to tell me about how people in his class did. Let us keep in mind that my roommate has a German background. We began talking, and he mentioned that some of the “dumber” kids ended up getting something like a 26 or a 27 composite on the ACT. As I began to think about what this meant, I thought back to my graduating class, and what the highest ACT score was. There was this one girl, she was the smartest of the class, graduating with above a 4.0 GPA, this girl had gotten a 28 on her ACT. This did not make any sense to me, the smartest girl in our school got only one point higher than the lowest in my roommate’s class? I asked him what his ACT score was, and he replied with a 29. Once I asked my other friends (Asians and Hispanics), they replied with something similar to those test scores that people in my graduating class received.

            After this talk, I began to ask myself a couple of questions about how my school could be different in any way to his school, and what may have been some factors to his school doing better. The first and most obvious answer was that his school was predominantly white, while my school was over 90% Latino. Second, we talked about his school and the types of teachers he had. His school was a catholic school, and the teachers in his school got paid minimum, meaning that they were probably teaching out of passion, not for the money. Once we discussed these two points, I began to think about how exactly it can be possible for the majority of his graduating class to do so much better than most of my graduating class.

            My idea behind this is that perhaps since most catholic schools are considered private schools, the students attending catholic schools feel the need to do far better in school. Another interesting this that I found was that my roommate does things like read for fun. Back in my school, only the smart kids, which was only the top five students, would read for fun. I never found myself reading for fun, or even reading that much when I had to for that matter. I am sure that family motivation has something to do with it as well. My mother never told me to continue reading, and to do the best that I could. My roommate on the other hand, I am sure his parents were paying top dollar for his attendance at his school, so that probably led them to tell their son to do his best. Another possibility could be that since his family (white) has been around in the US for a longer time, he comes from a more educated background, while I come from a family where the highest grade reached was the third grade. Race is a key difference because I noticed things that he tells me about his family are things completely opposite to my family. For example, his grandmother at some point owned land in Germany, they later sold it and got a lot of money off of it. My family, on the other hand, had to leave school so that they can work in order to be able to survive in Mexico.