Increasing the Recruitment and Retention of Historically Underrepresented Minority Students in Higher Education
There is a need for more bilingual and/or minority speech-language pathologists to serve an increasingly diverse population. To recruit and retain minority students, faculty in university training programs should increase their awareness of minority students’ needs and expectations. This paper reviews the literature pertaining to the factors relating to minority students’ success in higher education and reports the results of a survey designed to assess students’ perceptions of factors related to academic success. It also delineates how faculty of the Department of Communicative Disorders at California State University, Fullerton, used these results to improve the recruitment and retention of minority students. Because there is a dynamic relationship between faculty, students, and institutional requirements, other communicative disorders departments are encouraged to use this survey to better understand and respond to their students’ needs.