About University Profiles
This section serves to compare the Ohio State University with other benchmark universities around the country. Ohio State uses these benchmark universities to assess the quality of its Latino/a Studies and Latin American Studies departments.
Each school was evaluated based on the website their department designed. We chose to examine website because all schools have them and that is the most popular way for someone to retrieve information about a department. On each website, we evaluated the courses offered, program structure and demographics of each school. We also took into account the aesthetics of the website to see how the department markets itself to prospective students.
Latino/a Studies VS Latin American Studies
In the process of collecting data about Latino/a Studies programs in select colleges throughout the United States, we came across differences in the way colleges name their programs and differences in the actual focus of the departments. The main difference is between Latino/a Studies programs and Latin American Studies programs.
When talking to staff at universities with these programs, you will find that they are adamant about the separation of their programs and this is for good reason. These two departments are completely different entities with different faculty, resources and goals. In short, a Latin American Studies program teaches students about Latin America, their people and their culture, while a Latino/a Studies program teaches students about the Latino culture and experience in the United States. The content of these programs overlap in some place though. When teaching Latino/a Studies, it is important to teach the history of the Latino people in the U.S. This usually means teaching a brief course in the history of Latin America, other schools approach it differently and teach about the history of the Latino experience in the U.S. since the creation of the country.
In the following profiles, there are references to both Latino/a Studies programs and Latin American Studies programs. While we looked for Latino/a Studies program information, sometimes when these schools did not have such department, we profiled their Latin American Studies program. We did so in an attempt to reach one of our main goals in this project, which is to analyze the experience of Latinos in higher education. We believe it would be better to profile a program that has a Latino focus than to profile no program at all.