Milwaukee’s college prep programs have shown improvement in growing academic achievement for Hispanic children, but not Black students. And access to programs are often too limited to create institutional change across the city.
Those findings are part of a recent report by the Black and Latino Ecosystem and Support Transition, or BLEST, Hub at Marquette University which highlights the Black and brown college student perspective.
The group began in 2019 as a collaboration of Marquette, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Milwaukee Area Technical College and Milwaukee Public Schools to build a greater understanding of the needs of Black and brown students in Milwaukee.
As Milwaukee’s Hispanic population has grown over the last 20 years, there have been increasing efforts by many charter and choice high schools and the city’s universities to intentionally interact with Latino students.
Over the last decade, Cristo Rey, two of the Carmen Schools and St. Augustine Preparatory Academy opened on the city’s south side. During that same time, Hispanic enrollment increased 114 percent at Marquette University and 76 percent at UW-Milwaukee, the report found.
Walter Lanier, CEO of the African American Leadership Alliance of Milwaukee and one of the founders of the BLEST Hub, said the strides made for Hispanic students are good. But Black students continue to need support.