Building Connections, Expanding Opportunity

Baylor’s Latin America and Latinx Student Support Initiative is strengthening relationships across campus and around the world.

For Baylor University, global engagement begins with relationships—relationships among students, faculty and staff, partner institutions, and communities around the world. During the 2025–2026 academic year, the Latin America and Latinx Student Support Initiative (LALSSI) brought that idea into sharper focus, examining how Baylor can deepen its connections to Latin America while creating stronger pathways for Hispanic/Latino students to thrive at home and abroad.

The initiative’s work spanned three complementary areas: strengthening Baylor’s partnerships throughout Latin America, creating clearer pathways for faculty research and international mobility, and identifying ways to better support Hispanic/Latino students throughout their Baylor experience.

Together, these efforts point toward a more connected vision of global engagement—one that links international partnerships with student success, faculty scholarship, research, service and learning.

Investing in Stronger Partnerships

Baylor already has a substantial network of connections throughout Latin America, including approximately 14 institutional agreements, 16 missions and 52 research collaborations. To identify opportunities for deeper, more strategic engagement, the LALSSI Partnerships Subcommittee surveyed faculty and evaluated existing relationships according to research potential, student learning, financial sustainability, strategic alignment, institutional reciprocity, community engagement, institutional capacity and operational feasibility. 

The result was a recommendation to develop a strategic network centered on three established Baylor partners: Universidad de Costa Rica, Universidad Nacional de Cuyo in Argentina, and Universidad San Francisco de Quito in Ecuador. Each institution represents a different geographic region and offers opportunities for student and faculty exchange, research, teaching, service and community engagement.

The partnerships also demonstrate the breadth of Baylor’s existing international relationships.

At the Universidad de Costa Rica, Baylor’s established graduate study abroad program connects students with research, service learning and community engagement, including opportunities to work with rural field research stations and local schools. At Universidad Nacional de Cuyo, a relationship dating to 1996 has grown to encompass study abroad, research, medical shadowing, English-language teaching and reciprocal student exchange. And at Universidad San Francisco de Quito, Baylor students and faculty have access to extensive research and exchange opportunities, including the Galápagos Islands and the Tiputini Biodiversity Station in the Amazon.

The goal is not simply to add more partnerships, but to invest strategically in relationships that are already reciprocal, sustainable and meaningful for Baylor students and faculty.

Creating Pathways for Faculty Global Engagement

Strong international partnerships also depend on faculty who are prepared and supported to engage with them. The Research and Faculty Mobility Subcommittee developed a guiding document to help Baylor faculty navigate the process of preparing for international research and teaching—from developing relationships with host institutions to securing funding, addressing travel and visa requirements, coordinating responsibilities at Baylor and completing necessary compliance and registration requirements.

The recommendations emphasize that successful international research often begins years before a trip takes place. Faculty are encouraged to establish relationships with international colleagues well in advance, communicate with potential host institutions during the grant-writing process, and work closely with their departments, deans, the Office of the Vice Provost for Research and the Center for Global Engagement.

The committee also highlighted opportunities for faculty to build upon Baylor’s existing international relationships and pursue external funding, including Fulbright programs. Baylor faculty have recently participated in Fulbright opportunities in countries including Brazil, Slovakia, Hungary, Kenya, South Korea, Ireland, India and Germany. 

By creating clearer guidance and stronger connections between faculty and university resources, the initiative seeks to make international research and teaching more accessible and sustainable.

Supporting Students at Home—and Around the World

LALSSI’s work also examined the experiences of Hispanic/Latino students at Baylor, recognizing that meaningful global engagement must be paired with meaningful support on campus.

The Latinx Student Support Subcommittee found encouraging signs. For the Fall 2024 cohort, first-year retention among Hispanic/Latino students reached 89%, equal to that of their non-Hispanic/Latino peers. At the same time, a persistent graduation gap remains, with Hispanic/Latino students graduating at lower rates than their peers over the past several years.

The data also revealed both connection and opportunity. More than 70% of Hispanic/Latino first-year students reported a positive sense of belonging early in their Baylor experience, while 71% of surveyed students said that at least one faculty or staff member had taken a personal interest in their success. Yet 42.9% reported having felt out of place often or very often during the academic year, demonstrating the continued importance of personal relationships, representation and culturally responsive support. 

One of the clearest successes identified by the committee is Adelante, Baylor’s cohort-based student success program. Recent Adelante cohorts achieved 100% first-year retention, while the program’s six-year graduation rate reached 86%, compared with 74% among Hispanic/Latino students overall. The committee recommended institutionalizing the program so that its benefits can reach more students and continue beyond the availability of external grant funding.

The committee also identified an important connection between student success and global learning. Hispanic/Latino students reported relatively low participation in study abroad and international mission experiences, prompting recommendations for more intentional outreach, bilingual resources and family-centered communication about global opportunities.

Among the recommendations is the development of a Latin America Flagship Program, created through collaboration among Arts & Sciences, the Center for Global Engagement and the Moody School of Education, with an emphasis on making international experiences more accessible to students with high financial need.

A More Connected Vision of Global Engagement

Taken together, the work of LALSSI reflects a broader understanding of what it means to be a globally engaged university.

It means building partnerships that endure. It means equipping faculty to collaborate, teach and conduct research across borders. It means ensuring students have the support and resources they need to participate fully in the life of the university—and in opportunities beyond it.

The initiative’s work ultimately points toward a model in which global engagement is not a separate experience, but a thread woven throughout the Baylor experience: connecting students to communities, faculty to colleagues, research to real-world settings, and Baylor to partners across Latin America and beyond.

The next phase will focus on turning these recommendations into action, including development of a detailed white paper on the proposed Latin American partnership network for consideration by Baylor leadership and international partners.

In that sense, the work of LALSSI is about more than identifying opportunities. It is about building the relationships and structures that allow those opportunities to become lasting parts of Baylor’s mission of preparing students for worldwide leadership and service.