Wayne State University ranks high among the national leaders of doctoral degrees awarded to Hispanics, according to The Hispanic Outlook in Higher Education's "Top 100 Colleges for Hispanics 2009" edition. Hispanic Outlook used 2009 data collected from the National Center for Education Statistics to compile the rankings.

WSU, which awarded seven doctoral degrees to Hispanics from July 2008 to June 2009, also earned the honor of being the highest-ranked Michigan school on the list.

"Wayne State is an academic setting that values and actively seeks diversity as a way of enriching the intellectual and social environment," said Virginia Zuverza (Ph.D., clinical psychology, Wayne State), who received her doctoral degree in 2008.

"While the quality of education speaks for itself, this national ranking serves as a powerful welcome to prospective Latino/Latina students."

Jacqueline Vazquez, currently an undergraduate student at Wayne State who plans on pursuing a career in nursing, said that the ranking will inspire students to not only further their educational careers, but also have a positive impact on their community.

"This will give a lot of people in the Latino/Latina community hope and encourage them to come to Wayne State to further their education," said Vazquez, who also serves as president of the Wayne State University Hispanic Heritage Room, known as El Salón de Nuestra Cultura.

"This ranking will help to show outsiders that there really are a lot of good things happening in the Detroit area."

Wayne State's Center for Chicano-Boricua Studies (CBS), one of the oldest Latino/Latin American Studies programs in the Midwest, recently developed a community-university partnership to address retention and graduation rates among underrepresented and first generation college students at WSU. Its' College to Career (C2C) Program is a two-year professional and leadership development initiative that emphasizes graduate and professional school preparedness while linking juniors and seniors to established leaders in a variety of public and private sector fields.

Wayne State University is a premier urban research university offering more than 350 academic programs through 13 schools and colleges to nearly 32,000 students.