Ebelia Hernandez, an assistant professor at Rutgers’ Graduate School of Education hopes her experience as the daughter of Mexican immigrants can help fine tune the campus experience for a new generation of Latino students.

With funding from a Rutgers Faculty Grant, Hernandez is exploring such matters as adherence to faith and devotion to family to gauge their impact on day-to-day undergraduate life among students whose families hail from the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Colombia, Peru, and Ecuador.

“There is a disparity in higher education – Latinos are on the lowest end in terms of access to college and degree attainment,” Hernandez says. “We lag behind all the other ethnic groups.”

In the fall of 2010, in an attempt to bridge that gap, Hernandez launched the Latina College Student Experience research project. She began a series of one-on-one interviews with 17 volunteers, all first-year students, most of them the first in their families to attend college. A second study, concentrating on male students, is under way.

Hernandez based some of the questions on her own recollections of growing up in an immigrant family in Chico, California, where only Spanish was spoken at home. Ties to God, church, and family defined her days and nights. To the bewilderment of her roommates, Hernandez hung a rosary over her bed at Chico State College – not the usual adornment in a college student’s room, she acknowledges today.

“In some senses, I had a lot in common with these women I was interviewing,” she notes. Like them, she understood the implicit imperative not to stray too far from her parents‘ hearth. Like them, she felt compelled to make the pilgrimage home on weekends to prevent the ties from fraying.

Hernandez kept this dynamic in mind when she crafted her questionnaire, asking respondents to describe the role family played in their lives, how they decided on Rutgers for their college choice, and what organizations they’d gravitated to on campus, among other things.

She was struck, she says, by the ease and eloquence with which the women spoke of their spirituality, and by how often belief in a higher power came up in conversation.

“I believe in a personal relationship with Jesus Christ,” Betsy told her. “I feel I love my faith because it brings me so much joy.” And this from Violet: “I remember the first day of school my mom gave me a cared. It’s a list – remember to pray, remember to eat, all of those things.”

Dolores spoke of how prayer gave her a sense of a personal relationship with God, allowing her to seek guidance and support. In particular, she told Hernandez, she sought God’s help when she was struggling with her choice of a major.

“Like the whole bio[logy major] thing. I didn’t know if I should just be done with it, so I guess I prayed a long time … and I felt … that it’s not the path that God wanted me to take. So He gave me the courage to tell my parents.”

Many of the women Hernandez surveyed had maintained strong bonds with their churches back home. Some reported having impromptu conversations about religion with friends in dorm hallways, and joining campus religion-based organizations.

The students spoke of struggling to overcome negative stereotypes, of feeling the burden to represent their extended community with dignity and grace. And always, talk during the 30- to 70-minute interviews returned to the centrality of family in the young women’s lives.

“An overwhelming facet of their experience on campus is that they go home on weekends to maintain the strong ties – for them, that was huge,” Hernandez said.

As a result of her ongoing research, the professor has several recommendations for her Rutgers colleagues, among them:

Promote the value of involvement fairs to facilitate the connection between new students and faith-based communities. All the women Hernandez surveyed said the university’s involvement fair, held at the beginning of the year, was a major source of information that helped them plan which groups to seek out.

Create positive, welcoming spaces for informal conversations about religion, spirituality, and faith. The students told Hernandez that they felt Rutgers was a place where diversity was accepted, and that they felt comfortable talking with their peers about religious differences.

Support students in developing ways to manage family expectations. Because the study showed how significant home ties are, Hernandez urges student-affairs educators to understand how many Latinas struggle with fears of disappointing their families by not meeting standards regarding religious practice.

Hernandez plans to follow her 17 subjects over their next few years on campus and is recruiting undergraduate Latino men for a companion study. Anyone interested in participating can contact her at RutgersLatino@gmail.com.