click to enlarge Robert Hubner, WSU Photo Services
WSU Spanish translation team
A year ago, when Washington State University was redoing its financial aid website to make it "faster and friendlier," they came up with an idea, says Brian Dixon, WSU assistant vice president of student financial services.
"We said, 'what we should do is translate the whole page into Spanish,'" Dixon says.
Today, the university announced that it had launched a student financial services
website that is entirely translated into Spanish. Dixon says WSU might be the
first in the country to do so. He adds that it's an important step in helping bilingual students and their families navigate the financial aid system.
"Parents are part of financial decisions, and students were telling us about stories where they were translating stuff to parents, and it was confusing information to them," Dixon says.
The Spanish website, he says, makes it that much easier to make important financial decisions for a growing student demographic. According to WSU, in seven years the number of Hispanic undergraduate students as more than doubled at the university — from 1,405 Hispanics in 2009 to 3,512 in fall 2016. Hispanics make up roughly 14.1 percent of WSU's undergraduate students.