Mexican colleges look to expand in US to serve immigrants IN an ethnically themed shopping centre called Plaza Mexico just south of Los Angeles, a public university from the Mexican state of Colima has planted its flag. Alongside the shopping centre's stores and taquerias, the University of Colima offers mostly remedial education in reading, writing and maths to about 100 Mexican immigrants. But a handful of students here are preparing to take their final exams for Mexican degrees, just one of several recent efforts by Mexican universities to branch into providing full-fledged university educations in the United States. "It's important for at least one university to pursue this," said Ana Uribe, a University of Colima professor who runs the Lynwood branch. In fact, several Mexican universities are considering stepping in to offer accredited university classes in California and other states primarily to serve an immigrant population that lags far behind others in college education. California, where public universities have been dealing with deep budget cuts and enrolment limits, probably will be the principal target of Mexican universities. There's a huge market in the state, where Latinos account for more than 52 per cent of public school students who'll eventually be college-aged. A quarter of elementary-school students nationwide are Hispanic, the Pew Research Centre reports. Conversations between Mexican and US universities have increased to the point that US accreditors, knowing they'll be asked to evaluate more Mexican schools soon, are working with their Mexican counterparts to find out more about higher education south of the border, said William Plater, who advises the Western Association of Schools and Colleges - the primary accreditor in the Western United States - on international affairs. "We think it's in our best interest to learn more about quality assurance," he said. The days of Mexican campuses in the US are just around the corner, some said. "I don't think it will be five, 10, 20 years" before Mexican universities build US campuses, said Jonathan Brown, a higher-education consultant who's working with Mexico's Centre for Higher and Technical Education as it decides whether to expand to Sacramento. I think it will be sooner. In the next few years, we're going to be two million degrees short of what California needs. Who wouldn't want to go to a first-rate (Mexican) university close to home? Nearly 34 million people in the US identify themselves as Mexican or of Mexican origin, but only five out of every 100 have university degrees, compared with about a third of immigrants in general, according to the Migration Policy Institute. About 35 per cent of native-born citizens do. In California, only 10 per cent of Hispanic immigrants aged 25 and 26 have completed at least two-year degrees, compared with the state average of 36 per cent, according to a report to be released soon by the institute. Latino youth - both immigrants and those born in the US - have the lowest rate of college attainment in California, researchers found. Even Hispanics who do enrol in American colleges and universities are 50 per cent less likely than non-Hispanics are to earn bachelor's degrees by age 24, Pew reports.