Hispanics: a problem of definition in higher education policies

The purpose of this chapter is to address a fundamental question: how can educational policies be effectively evaluated if the definition of the target population is blurry? In the United States, the ethnic category, “Hispanic”, is relatively new, occurring on the Census Forms after 1960. Over time, the definition has changed. To complicate matters further, different definitions are used to collect data from different forms at the same point in time. A small case study of affirmative action policies at Pennsylvania State University is used to illustrate the problem.