Latino Americans, the largest and the fastest growing ethnic minority in the United States, are half as likely to hold a college degree as non-Hispanic white adults, an education gap that has been widening since 2000, according to a June 2018 report.
“For us, it was surprising just how low the Latino degree attainment numbers are and how significant the gaps are in certain states,” said Andrew Howard Nichols, senior director of higher education research and data analytics at The Education Trust, a nonprofit group that conducts research and advocates for low-income students. “Everyone is pushing degree attainment. But we won’t reach our goals for a college-educated workforce if we ignore the racial gaps that exist.”
Fewer than a quarter, or 22.6 percent, of Latino Americans ages 25 to 64 held a two-year college degree or higher in 2016, the report said. By comparison, more than 30 percent of black American adults had a college degree, and nearly half, or 47.1 percent of white adults did. That’s nearly a 25 percentage point gap in college attainment between Latinos and whites.
Latino education varies a lot from state to state. In Florida, a third of Latino adults hold a college degree. The number of Latinos with college degrees is rapidly growing in Florida and the Latino-white gap is one of the smallest at 10 percentage points. However, Florida has large Cuban and Puerto Rican populations, many of whom come from well-educated families. Roughly 40 percent of Cuban Americans and 30 percent of Puerto Ricans have college degrees. By contrast, only 17 percent of Mexican Americans have college degrees, with many Mexicans emigrating from poor, uneducated regions in Mexico. Florida’s success with Latino higher education may have more to do with the particular Latinos who live in Florida than with how the state supports Latino students academically or financially.
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New York’s statistics are also confounding. More than a fourth of the state’s large Latino population has a college degree. That’s an impressive 9 percentage point jump since 2000, putting the state in first place for gains in Latino college attainment. However, the gap between Latinos and whites remains stubbornly high at 29 percentage points.
The reasons why Latinos are struggling to obtain a college education are complex. Latinos are disproportionately poor, living in low-income communities where the schools aren’t preparing children for the rigor of college courses. As they enter adulthood, many are supporting their families and don’t have the luxury to focus on schoolwork. Nichols pointed out that Latinos are more likely to opt for community colleges and for-profit colleges, where graduation rates are lower. Many are the first in their families to attempt a degree.
Reports like this one are a helpful first step in identifying the most difficult obstacles. The next step at The Education Trust is to count how many Latinos ever enrolled in college in each state so that we can better understand how much of these low college numbers are due to college dropouts versus those who never attempt college. The solutions will be different depending on the answers. And they’ll help determine the future of the U.S. workforce and economic prosperity.
This story about Latino college education was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.
A group of us have been interested in education of U.S.-born Hispanics for some time concentrated in the STEM sector; thus, the existence of SACNAS which commemorated its 45th anniversary last October with over 4,400 attending. Increasingly, it seems that the absence of Latino faculty in top tier universities to effect improvement is a principal obstacle. How to manage corrective action is a decided challenge which would be amply reduced should those universities agree and would accept a meaningful strategy to deal with the issue.
What is the statistic of people who are of Mexican American culture? The US born Hispanic culture is growing in interest naturally and it would be beneficial to know and understand these statistics.