President Obama's announcement this week regarding his proposal to pay for two years of community college could have a huge effect on millions of Latinos around the nation who are considering a postsecondary education.

Obama administration officials are projecting that, if enacted, Obama's new proposal, which would involve having federal and state government pay the entire cost for tuition at community colleges nationwide for two years for any American who wishes to go that route, could pay for the education of roughly 9 million people around the U.S. over a 10-year period; early projections show that the program could cost $60 billion over that 10-year span.

The plan, Obama said at Pellissippi State Community College in Tennessee on Friday, was designed in order to help the U.S. become competitive with the rest of the world.

"America thrived in the 20th century in large part because we made a high school education the norm, and then we sent a generation to college on the GI Bill," Obama said Friday, according to the White House's transcript of his speech. "But eventually, the world caught on. The world caught up. And that's why we need to lead the world in education again," he said.

The plan, if enacted, could have far-reaching effects on Latinos aspiring to become college graduates. In 2012, a study from the Pew Hispanic Center projected that Latinos had become the largest minority on college campuses nationwide. The study showed that roughly 16.5 percent of all college students around the U.S. were Latinos, while Hispanics also made up roughly one quarter of all 18-to-24-year-old college students, their numbers particularly growing in two-year colleges.

From what recent studies have shown, more Latinos have been making the push to enter college in the last few years. In 2013, a report from the U.S. Census Bureau showed that Latino enrollment college went up between 2011 and 2012 by a stunning 324,000. The study also found that a greater share of Latinos graduating right out of high school, the 18-to-24-year-old demographic, were entering into colleges than whites.

However, despite the high number of Latinos entering college, not as many are graduating. Reports from both the Census bureau in 2012 and Excelencia in Education indicate that Latinos are graduating from college at low rates compared to their non-White counterparts. The 2014 report from Excelencia in Education showed that only 20 percent of Latino adults nationwide completed a postsecondary degree, while 36 percent of all adults in the U.S. have earned college degrees.

The Pew center's 2012 findings seemed to correlate this, projecting that 112,000 Latinos received an associate degree while 140,000 Hispanics earned a bachelor's degree, which were both new highs for those respective categories among Latinos. However, the study noted that Latinos "continue to lag other groups," with 1.2 million of the 1.7 million bachelor's degrees awarded in the U.S. in 2010 belong awarded to non-Hispanic white students and 165,00 being given to non-Hispanic black students.

Excelencia in Education's 2014 study projected that for the U.S. to earn the top global ranking for college degrees awarded, Latinos in the U.S. will need to earn 5.5 million more degrees by 2020. To do that, Deborah A. Santiago and Emily Calderón Galdeano, the study's authors, noted that the nation had to take several steps, including scaling up programs and initiatives that work for Latino and other students.