Finance
Study: Latino Students Use Practical Strategies to Finance College Education
The report, “How Latinos Pay for College: 2025 National Trends,” builds on two decades of research and reveals that while Latino students demonstrate high financial need, they are employing effective cost-saving measures to make higher education affordable.
“Latinos are representative of a post-traditional student profile and changes in policy will be more impactful if made with the strengths and opportunities to serve this profile of students,” write Deborah A. Santiago, CEO, and Sarita E. Brown, President of Excelencia in Education, in the report’s foreword.
The study found that Latino students, who represent one in five postsecondary students nationwide, are more likely to be first-generation college-goers (51% compared to 22% of white students), come from lower-income households (70% have family incomes below $50,000), and have an expected family contribution (EFC) of zero (45%).
“Latino students make pragmatic choices with what they can control to make college affordable,” said Cassandra Arroyo, a research analyst at Excelencia and co-author of the report.
To manage costs, Latino students employ multiple strategies: 56% work 30 or more hours weekly while enrolled, 55% attend part-time or mix their enrollment, 81% choose public institutions, and 89% live off-campus or with parents. These tactics represent a clear departure from the traditional college student profile and align with what Excelencia calls “post-traditional” learners.
The data reveals that Latinos rely more heavily on federal financial aid (58%) than state (30%), institutional (23%), or private aid (13%). Perhaps most significantly, Latino students are more than twice as likely to receive grants (67%) than take out loans (27%), indicating a strong preference for aid that doesn’t require repayment.
Yet despite high application rates for aid (85%), Latinos receive the lowest average financial aid among all racial/ethnic groups at $11,004, compared to $15,850 for Asian, $12,937 for White, and $12,365 for African American students.
“Twenty years later, we are revisiting what has changed and what has stayed the same. There has clearly been some progress, but the need to expand access to opportunity remains,” noted Santiago in the report’s foreword, referencing Excelencia’s initial study on Latino financial aid patterns from 2005.
The report also examines differences in aid receipt by institution type. Latino students at public two-year institutions are less likely to receive financial aid (57%) than those at other sectors, especially private institutions (87%). Furthermore, undergraduate Latinos attending private for-profit institutions are more likely to borrow federal loans (60%) compared to those at public two-year institutions (5%).
Another key finding reveals that Latino students are more likely to receive need-based aid rather than merit-based aid. For state grants, 16% of Latino students received need-based grants compared to only 2% who received merit-only grants.
The report highlights innovative approaches implemented by institutions certified with the Seal of Excelencia. These 46 certified institutions represent less than 1% of all colleges and universities but enroll 17% and graduate 19% of all Latino students nationwide.
Among these institutions, several standout examples emerged. The University of Texas at Austin’s Texas Advance Commitment fully covers tuition for students with family incomes up to $65,000, while Miami Dade College provides “Last Mile Scholarships” for students who left with 13 or fewer credits remaining. Other institutions, like Metropolitan State University of Denver, created emergency retention funds to support students experiencing unexpected financial challenges.
“Leading institutions make choices with what they can control to make college more affordable,” said Emily Labandera, director of research at Excelencia and co-author of the report. “The institutions highlighted in this brief represent a select group of trendsetters that make up the Seal of Excelencia certified institutions that strive to go beyond enrollment to intentionally serve Latino students.”
The report concludes with policy recommendations at institutional, state, and federal levels. These include investing in guaranteed tuition plans by family income, including basic needs in financial aid calculations, prioritizing Pell Grants, and revising the Federal Work-Study distribution formula to better support students with high financial need.
“Excelencia believes that good policy is informed by good practice,” the authors note, emphasizing that intentionally serving Latino students at scale requires understanding what works to accelerate their success.
With Latino enrollment in postsecondary education projected to increase by 31% by 2030, the findings provide critical insights for institutions and policymakers seeking to create more affordable pathways to degree completion for this growing demographic.
“We firmly believe that disaggregating our data and knowing how Latinos are participating in financial aid informs opportunities to compel action that can more intentionally serve other students as well,” write Santiago and Brown. “And understanding how institutions committed to intentionally serving Latino, and all, students are leveraging financial support to recruit, retain, and advance them to degree completion and connect them to the workforce is an opportunity to leverage and scale their innovation.”
For a company navigating one of the most consequential transformations in its history, financial clarity is not optional—it is essential. Natura &Co, the Brazilian personal care and cosmetics group behind iconic brands such as Natura and Avon, has long been committed to combining purpose-driven business with commercial performance. After a period of strategic portfolio reshaping, including the divestiture of its Aesop and The Body Shop holdings, the company is now sharpening its focus on profitability and operational excellence across Latin America and global markets.
At the center of that effort sits a deceptively complex challenge: understanding, in real time, which revenue and cost factors are driving or eroding gross margin across a highly diversified business. For years, answering that question meant manual reporting, delayed insights, and finance teams spending valuable time on data gathering rather than analysis.
That’s now changing, thanks to a co-innovation initiative developed together with SAP and Numen, a global SAP partner specializing in digital transformation and enterprise software implementation.
From manual reporting to proactive decision intelligence
The project’s goal was to replace a labor-intensive gross margin analysis process with a generative AI application embedded directly into Natura &Co’s financial workflows. Built on SAP Business AI Platform, SAP’s unified foundation integrating business technology, data, and AI capabilities, the application connects directly to data in SAP S/4HANA to provide finance teams with automated insights and narrative recommendations in real time, without the need for manual data pulls or offline reporting.
The application enables users to explore revenue, cost, and margin drivers interactively, identifying at a glance which elements are protecting or eroding margin performance across markets and product lines. Crucially, human oversight remains central to the design: the AI application generates insights, while finance professionals retain full control over interpretation and decisions.
“The implementation of gross margin analysis using AI in SAP S/4HANA marked an inflection point in the analytical capability of our finance area,” said Rogério Dias Garcia, tech manager, ERP Latam, Natura &Co. “We overcame delays and raised the standard of insights by integrating margin analysis from SAP S/4HANA with a large language model connected via the SAP AI Core layer. This architecture allowed us to provide, in an agile, secure, and completely anonymous manner, a stratified and precise view of gross margin offenders and protectors—discriminating exactly which revenue or cost elements were driving market performance.”
A collaborative architecture for scalable AI adoption
Natura &Co’s application derived from a prototype SAP partner Numen created in early 2024 at SAP’s global Hack2Build on business AI, leveraging the generative AI capabilities of SAP Business AI Platform. The solution was designed and developed through close collaboration between Natura &Co, Numen, and SAP. From the outset, the approach was to align AI adoption with concrete business priorities, ensuring the application would be scalable and production-ready rather than a standalone prototype.
Numen brought deep SAP implementation expertise to the project, combining knowledge of SAP S/4HANA architecture with hands-on experience in building solutions on SAP Business AI Platform. The technology stack—SAP S/4HANA, SAP AI Core, SAP Fiori, and SAP Business Technology Platform—provided the secure, integrated foundation needed to connect financial data with generative AI capabilities in an enterprise context.
“SAP enabled the transformation by providing the technological foundation and expert support,” said Carlos Aravechia, head of Data Design & Intelligence at Numen.
The success of the project has validated a broader conviction at Natura &Co: that generative AI, embedded directly in ERP workflows, can fundamentally reposition finance from a transactional function to a strategic business partner.
A blueprint for other businesses
The Natura &Co project demonstrates a pattern that other organizations can replicate, particularly those running SAP S/4HANA. The combination of structured ERP data with the contextual reasoning capabilities of large language models creates a foundation for decision intelligence that goes well beyond traditional business intelligence tools.
The project was built within a six-month co-innovation sprint and went live in August 2025. It is currently in use across Natura &Co’s Equador operations.
Looking ahead, Natura &Co is already planning the next phase: integrating Joule Agents to further automate the extraction of standard analytical content and deepen the AI-driven optimization of financial processes.
“The success of this initiative validates the transformative potential of embedded AI within our ERP,” Dias Garcia noted. “We are now ready to move forward—deepening these insights and integrating the capability of Joule Agents to maximize the extraction of standard content and further optimize our business decisions.”
For SAP customers evaluating how to move from AI experimentation to AI in production, the Natura &Co project offers a concrete, replicable model: start with a high-value, well-defined business process, embed AI directly into existing workflows, and build in human oversight from the start.
A girl from a disadvantaged rural family in central China topped this year’s gaokao, attracting numerous live-streamers eager to finance her education, which she declined.
The home of 18-year-old secondary school graduate Han Yaping in a Henan province village was recently bustling with live-streamers.
This attention came after Han achieved an impressive score of 699 out of 750 in the gaokao, China’s national college entrance exam.
She has received offers from China’s two leading universities, Tsinghua University and Peking University.
Han’s accomplishment is particularly remarkable given her family’s impoverished circumstances.
Her mother suffers from ankylosing spondylitis, an inflammatory arthritis affecting the spine, preventing her from working. Her father, who earns a living through farming and odd jobs, serves as the family’s sole provider. Han also has a younger sister.
The UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) published a landmark review on Monday that proposes recommendations to regulate the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on the financial decisions made by consumers.
The review, titled the Mills Review, anticipates that both consumers and firms will start delegating “more financial decision-making to AI systems,” including for agreements, initiating transactions, and executing decisions “within agreed parameters.” One of the key findings of the review outlined that while AI can help bridge advice gaps and “support growth,” there remain risks “associated with fraud, cyber security, and consumer harm.” Conducting the review, Sheldon Mills highlighted that “AI can also amplify risks: bias, discrimination, exclusion, opaque decision-making (particularly when multiple AI models interact), misleading or hallucinatory advice and erosion of consumer trust.”
The review stated that presently, one in five adults in the UK are “already open to AI making decisions for them,” particularly when decisions feel “complex or high stakes.” It found that roughly 26 percent of the population “trust general-purpose tools such as ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini for financial advice” with little awareness that such platforms provide no “formal routes to recourse” or protections.
Overall, the Mills Review identified four areas that it anticipates will be impacted by AI in the financial sector: “the transformation of firms,” “new consumer journeys,” “a reshaped competition landscape,” and “amplified financial crime and cyber risk.” The FCA projected the shift in how consumers and firms consult AI to take place by 2030.
The Mills Review put forth seven “priority” recommendations to be considered by the FCA Board. It recommended that any transitions to autonomous AI models be monitored and that regulatory frameworks and perimeters be adapted and secured. The review called for the strengthening of “system-wide coordination and oversight,” the scaling up of the FCA’s AI Lab to enable it to support AI models and innovation for agentic finance, and an “AI-enabled agentic supervisory model” to be built and adopted. Finally, it recommended that a trusted “public-interest AI-enabled financial capability service” be developed.
The FCA announced, in the press release, that it will launch an AI “good and poor practice publication” in late 2026.
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