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Sara Martinez Tucker
A Hero for Our Times
by Pam Losefsky
As though witnessing a terrible accident unfold before her eyes, Sara Martinez Tucker (BJ 76, MBA 79) can trace two national trends to their convergence not too far in the future and foretell tragedy. The 2000 U.S. Census indicates that the number of Hispanics skyrocketed over the last decade, from 22.3 million in 1990 to 38.8 million, making Hispanics the largest minority group in the country. At the same time, Hispanic teenagers continue to have the highest dropout rates of any major ethnic group: 28 percent, compared to 7 percent for Whites and 13 percent for African-Americans. Only 11 percent of Hispanics earn college degrees.
“If we don’t educate the Hispanic population,” Martinez Tucker warns, “the economy will go bust.” The situation is particularly dire in Texas where Hispanics make up 32 percent of population. “If we don’t educate Texas’ Hispanics, we won’t have the workers for the way industries are developing here. Then we’ll have to import talent. If you do that, you end up with local people who aren’t employed but still need social services, so the tax base goes up. There are fewer tax dollars for social security and so those people in Texas who are retiring won’t have enough to live on.”
A 2001 RAND study confirms Martinez Tucker’s brief analysis: “The industrial jobs that once formed the backbone of the American economy have dwindled to only 10 percent of the workforce. The service-sector jobs that have replaced them require a level of knowledge and skill that, for the most part, can be gained only through programs offered at colleges and universities.”
Martinez Tucker urges, “We’ve got to find a way to break this cycle before it spirals out of control.”
Her solution to prevent the impending disaster is straightforward: keep Hispanics in high school, prepare them for college, get them into college, and make sure they stay to earn their degrees. But to accomplish all this will be a Herculean task, akin to stepping into the intersection to stop those oncoming vehicles with her bare hands.
Muscling Up
The goal of the Hispanic Scholarship Fund, which Martinez Tucker has led since 1997, is to double the rate at which Hispanics earn their college degrees, to 18 percent, by 2010. (HSF established its goal in 1996, when the rate was 9 percent; since then it has risen to 11 percent.) “It’s going to take $6 billion to achieve this,” Martinez Tucker says, quantifying the need with businesslike frankness. And it’s going to take a businesslike approach to meet it—a language in which most non-profit organizations are not well-versed.
But most non-profits don’t have Sara Martinez Tucker at the helm, formerly the highest ranking (and only) Hispanic female executive at AT&T.
Marrying passion for her Hispanic community with a great talent for business, in five years Martinez Tucker has turned the former mom-and-pop organization into a well-oiled fundraising operation bent on creating win-win propositions for businesses and showing unmistakable return on investment.
Materials distributed by HSF to the business community outline the benefits for ‘Educational Investors,’ marketing opportunities, and possibilities for customized partnerships. Through such business-savvy strategies, HSF was able to award $26 million in scholarships to 6,703 students the past academic year, an increase of an incredible $19 million in just three years.
In addition to the unprecedented amount of financial support HSF has secured for Latino students, the organization also continues to establish innovative ways to build a pipeline of Latino students entering and graduating from college, while engaging Latino families to become advocates for their children’s education. Last year, HSF hosted more than 30 “Steps for Success” workshops and town hall meetings around the country, providing more than 4,500 students and their families with the critical tools needed to help them graduate from high school college-ready and to successfully navigate the college application and financial aid processes.
“The Procter & Gamble team told me they like working with HSF because we talk to them on their terms, we bring them a great value proposition.” She leans in close to emphasize this point, “My kids are not a charity, they’re an investment. Without my business degree I could never convince people of this.”
And Martinez Tucker spends all day, almost every day convincing people. Three weeks out of a month she’s on the road spreading her message.
Life’s Work
The week I catch up with her, she’s in Miami to give the keynote address at a breakfast for the county’s education community. The gathering is hosted by The Beacon Council, Miami-Dade County’s Economic Development Partnership.
The economic security of our children and our country, she tells them, begins with a college education. She’s said this a thousand times before—you can tell by the way she rattles off the statistics, by the way she speaks in fully formed thoughts without referring to notes of any kind. But from her mouth, the message is still poignant, and it brings the sting of a tear to your eye. You can tell this isn’t just a job to her, it’s her life’s work.
“The Hispanic Scholarship Fund asks for both your professional and personal support,” Martinez Tucker tells the group made up mostly of successful Latinos. “What I mean is that your financial backing is important, but it’s even more important for you to be involved personally. Go out into the communities and be the role models that these kids need,” she insists. “Make a personal commitment to do this.”
The following morning Martinez Tucker appears live on Univision’s ‘Despierta America,’ a Spanish-language version of ‘Good Morning America.’ Accompanying her is Edgar Sandoval, a past HSF scholar. “Students often don’t know where to get the money to go to school,” she says in Spanish. “Their parents didn’t go to college and are not aware of the options, where to get help.” As she talks, a video clip rolls, showing backpack-clad students walking across The University of Texas campus in Austin.
Sandoval, now a marketing manager with P&G, reinforces Martinez Tucker’s points, saying how the HSF scholarship helped him concentrate on his studies by eliminating the need to support himself while going through school. “I’m now in a position to help support HSF by getting my company involved in fundraising,” he adds.
In Sandoval is the perfect example of how the cycle can be broken.
“Call now,” urges the show’s host, as the toll free phone number and HSF web site address flash on the screen. “Go to college, make a better life for yourself.”
By 9:00 in the morning, Martinez Tucker is back in her hotel room, opening the door for her next appointment, an interview with the McCombs School alumni magazine. At the same time, she’s leaving voice messages for her staff back on the West Coast. It’s only 6:00 a.m. in San Francisco, but she wants them to hit the ground running when they get in.
When we get settled, I ask her about her challenges and the work that lies ahead.
Breaking the Cycle
“The reason many of these people are in this country is that they want a better life for their kids,” she explains. “But in the countries where they’re from, the norm is often only a third or a fifth grade education, so there is no understanding of how much education is enough.
“So many parents have said to me, ‘If my child gets a job that pays more than I earn, they must have enough education.’ Or if the child gets a job that pays benefits, dental and medical, there’s a thought process that that is enough. There is a complete lack of understanding about what’s happening in the economy and where the job growth is.
“Another issue our students tell us they face is that they feel an overwhelming sense of responsibility for their parents. When mom and dad are struggling and the kids can go out and work to help support the family, that’s what they are going to do. What they don’t realize is that the $10-an- hour job that seems so lucrative at first is all that they’ll ever achieve; they’ll get cost of living increases, and that’s about it, for the rest of their lives.”
Martinez Tucker continues, “And particularly for the oldest children, they are expected to help raise the family, especially if there’s just one parent. So, some of it’s cultural, and some of it’s just the fact that so many of us live in poverty in the United States.
“At the end of the day, we’re a humble culture, and many parents don’t believe their children are worthy of college. But I’m here to tell them they are.”
Some solutions from the public school system, Martinez Tucker believes, have exacerbated the problem rather than alleviated it. Consider vocational programs that steer low-performing middle-school students to less rigorous high school courses.
“What these students get instead of a high school diploma is a high school certificate,” she explains. “They don’t have trigonometry, they don’t have calculus, they don’t have the higher levels of science, so if they go to apply to a college, they find that they don’t have the right prerequisites. Then, they have to spend two more years at a community college getting what they missed in high school even to begin to apply to a four-year institution. So, they’re 18, they want to go to college, but they don’t want to waste two more years, so they just go out and work. There’s a lot of anger there.”
And the high school guidance counselors? “There are many who are overwhelmed and end up being babysitters and caretakers, just trying to keep kids from getting into trouble rather than giving them good advice,” she says. “Candidly, I’ve had a lot of counselors say to me, ‘You’re putting false notions in their heads. We know them, and the best that they can do is work for the local manufacturing plant, and as long as they know how to balance their checkbook, does it really matter?’
“Then I just get angry,” she says, shaking her head. “You don’t want anyone making a decision for you when you don’t even know what’s possible.”
Martinez Tucker’s job is to make sure they know what’s possible. And how she does that is proof that she knows the audience well. The outreach programs that HSF hosts meet Hispanic families on their own terms: they give plenty of notice and provide information in both Spanish and English that parents can take to their employers to secure time off from evening jobs. They invite entire families so that child care for younger siblings is not an issue, and they always provide a meal.
“We respect where they are and we meet them there, and it’s working,” she says, mentioning a meeting HSF held at a high school gymnasium in Georgia that drew more than 500 people. “And our message is, ‘It’s college, and your kids deserve it, and don’t feel inadequate because you can’t give them everything—no one can give them everything, that’s why we’re here to help.’”
What’s more, Martinez Tucker is including both native born Hispanics and the immigrant population in her outreach efforts. “We’ve got to achieve this for both groups,” she says. “They’re in this country, they’re not going away, and they’re contributing to the economy.”
Supporting this part of Martinez Tucker’s mission, a law passed in Texas declares that the children of immigrants who have been in the country for at least five years, and can prove that they’ve worked and contributed taxes, may enroll in college as residents as long as they apply for their citizenship at the same time.
“I think this is a great solution,” she says, “Otherwise these kids are in limbo. They’ve gone through U.S. high school and gotten good grades, but they would have to apply for college as an international student on a student visa. This is the kiss of death for them! First, they don’t have the money for international tuition; and second, they would have to go back to their countries of origin after college. Most of them have not been to their countries of origin since they were very young, there’s nothing there for them.”
The Texas law was the first of its kind on the books. California now has a similar law and other states are following. Martinez Tucker insists, “We can’t continue to punish the children for the acts of their parents, we can’t afford to.”
A Hero for our Times
Dr. Richard Carmona, the Surgeon General of the United States, was a high school dropout, Martinez Tucker tells me. After he earned his GED, the Hispanic Scholarship Fund gave him two scholarships to go to medical school. Lisa Quiroz, the founder and publisher of People en Español, took her HSF scholarships to Harvard to earn a business degree. These two were among the first five HSF alumni inducted into its new Alumni Hall of Fame, and represent the power of higher education to realize the potential in everyone.
By the end of the interview, it has become clear to me that she just might be able to do it. With heroic effort, Martinez Tucker and the Hispanic Scholarship Fund have begun to deflect the crush of destiny, in the process securing a better future not just for Latinos in this country, but for all of us.
For information on specific programs at the McCombs School, consult our contacts page. For media information, contact the Communications Director by phone at 512-471-3314 or by email at CommunicationsDirector@mccombs.utexas.edu.
