Texas State announces major foundation gift to assist Latino students

At a meeting on March 27, the Hector and Gloria López Foundation, an organization that provides tertiary educational opportunities for Latino students in Texas, announced Monday that they are donating $1.79 million to Texas State to assist first generation, Latino students that have been accepted to Texas State University for the fall of 2023.

The announcement came at the LBJ Student Center on the Texas State University campus.

The foundation’s CEO Sergio Rodriguez said, “We partner very intentionally with universities who the research and data shows are going out of their way to serve latino students.”

Vice President of Student Success at Texas State Cynthia Hernandez said 15 new freshmen will be notified with their upcoming acceptance letters that they were chosen to receive assistance from the foundation for the next five years, beginning with the Fall 2023 semester.

Hernandez said she was a López scholarship recipient during her college years at Texas State. The foundation has long contributed to the success of students here and at other universities and colleges in the state.

Hernandez said, “This grant not only provides tuition assistance but provides funding for value added programming and support that will enable them to thrive while they’re here at Texas State.”

According to Hernandez, approximately 40.5 percent of its students identify as Hispanic or Latino. Nationally, Texas state was ranked 47th for total master's degrees granted to Hispanics, 28th for total Hispanic enrollment among fouryear schools and 13th for total bachelor’s degrees granted to Hispanics.

The financial support will help to cover tutoring, mentorship, housing, study abroad programs, leadership development, paid internships and more.

Rodriguez said that in order to be eligible for the scholarship funds, students have to be from one of the five Texas areas that they serve, have a demonstrated financial need, be the first in their family to go to college and must be Latino.

“Our hope is that we provide a variety of students with opportunities that they would never get. Frequently it’s students who are most likely to succeed who get a lot of the scholarship funding,” Rodriguez said, adding that the foundation works to provide opportunities for other types of students as well including those “who may have worked two jobs in highschool and were doing everything they could to get through, and the fact that they made it this far as a first gen student, that is the merit component as far as we’re concerned.”