Hola! If ABC News wants to allege historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) are desperate to recruit Hispanics it better get its facts straight.
 
The network recently ran a story, “Black Universities Now Recruiting Latinos.”  The clip purported that HBCUs are having trouble attracting students and that Morehouse College in Atlanta and Miles College in Birmingham, Alabama, are looking in another direction, with campaigns to recruit more Hispanics. In 2006, Morehouse’s 2,800 all-male student body had a total of 15 Hispanics.
  
Now no one is going to say a black-brown alliance isn’t a good thing, and perhaps those two schools are reaching out. But a recent Journal of Blacks in Higher Education (JBHE) analysis of U.S. Department of Education data shows that very few Hispanic students actually choose to enroll at HBCUs.

In fact, JBHE found that only three black colleges have an Hispanic student population greater than five percent of the total enrollment, and those schools are located in areas with large Hispanic populations.

The JBHE also reported that HBCU black enrollment has gone up. The nation’s black colleges have slightly higher percentages of black students than they did 10 or 20 years ago. The numbers tell the real story.

In 2003, total HBCU enrollment was 303,512, up 8.3 percent over the previous decade. There were 245,494 black students on campus that comprised 81 percent of the total enrollment. By contrast, the largest group of non-black students at HBCUs is white. There are not only five times as many white students at HBCUs as there are Hispanics, but, even though HBCU Hispanic enrollment was up 57 percent, still are just 2.5 percent of all students.

Last year, Z. Diaz, a Hispanic.com staff writer,  in an article headlined  “Estudiantes are ‘a Changin’ At Historically Black Colleges” said that Hispanic registration at North Carolina’s black colleges has been growing steadily. And that National Center for Education Statistics projects that the number of college-bound Hispanics, nationally, will grow by at least 30 percent in the next 8 years.
 
At least for the present, if ABC had looked closely it might have found Hispanics, who can be of any race, are already on HBCU campuses. The difference is to ABC reporters' eyes, black Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, Panamanians may not stand out from other blacks on campus. Is that “claro” or clear?