R. Alexander Acosta


Chair of the ABA Commission on Hispanic Legal Rights & Responsibilities and Dean, College of Law, at Florida International University.


Acosta focused his remarks on education, an issue that “undergirds many other issues” in the Latino community, he said. Florida International University College of Law graduates the highest percentage of Latinos of any ranked law school in the country, and is housed at a university that is almost 80 percent Latino, Acosta noted. Latino law students face many challenges, including a lack of role models, a lack of sophistication about the educational system, and a lack of knowledge about how to prepare for law school.


Cultural factors can influence Latino students as well, Acosta said. The centrality of family to many Latinos sometimes causes students or recent graduates to curtail career opportunities. Often students must drop out or suspend their studies in order to work to support the family, Acosta said. In addition, recent graduates sometimes hesitate to accept excellent jobs or clerkships if they require them to leave their family’s geographic area. The percentage of Latino law grads is actually declining, Acosta noted. “When you’re not advancing as a group, you’re retrogressing,” he said, which means “we need to start thinking about these issues.”


Acosta also spoke about challenges facing Latino students at the secondary school level. Latinos, who make up about 25 percent of public school students nationwide, are over-represented in the public school system relative to their numbers in the population, he said. Latino dropout rates are very high. In South Florida, historically, for example, 21 percent of all high school students—many of them Latino—drop out after ninth grade. Only 50 percent of entering freshmen end up graduating from public high school. Some join gangs, but Acosta said, prosecuting gang members is not the answer. For every two gang members that are convicted “you get four more” because so many young people are out of school. But, Acosta said, “the school to prison pipeline is just part of the problem...If you don’t solve the educational problem you are going to have all sorts of problems in terms of socioeconomic status...housing, and other issues. These are fundamental problems that need to be solved because they lead to all the secondary issues we’re talking about,” Acosta said.


From the ABA Spring 2016


http://www.americanbarfoundation.org/uploads/cms/documents/rl_sprin...