Richard Fry, Ph.D. is a Senior Research Associate at the Pew Hispanic Center.
He has recognized expertise in the analysis of U.S. education and demographic data sets and has published more than 35 articles and monographs on the characteristics of U.S. racial, ethnic and immigrant populations. Before joining the Pew Hispanic Center in 2001, he was a senior economist at the Educational Testing Service (ETS).
Driven by a single-year surge of 24% in Hispanic enrollment, the number of 18- to 24-year-olds attending college in the United States hit an all-time high of 12.2 million in October 2010.
Median household wealth among Hispanics fell from $18,359 in 2005 to $6,235 in 2009—a 66% decline. This was larger than the decrease for black households (53%) and white households (16%), according to an analysis of newly-available Census Bureau data by the Pew Research Center’s Social & Demographic Trends project.
Just one-in-ten Hispanic high school drop-outs has a General Educational Development (GED) credential, widely regarded as the best “second chance” pathway to college, vocational training and military service for adults who do not graduate high school.
Young Latino adults in the United States are more likely to be in school or the work force now than their counterparts were in previous generations.
Hispanics now make up 22% of all children under the age of 18 in the United States–up from 9% in 1980–and as their numbers have grown, their demographic profile has changed.
The student population of America’s suburban public schools has shot up by 3.4 million in the past decade and a half, and virtually all of this increase (99%) has been due to the enrollment of new Latino, black, and Asian students.
Hispanics have accounted for more than half (50.5%) of the overall population growth in the United States in this decade, a significant new demographic milestone for the nation’s largest minority group.
The number of Hispanic students in the nation’s public schools nearly doubled from 1990 to 2006, accounting for 60% of the total growth in public school enrollments over that period.
Students designated as English language learners (ELL) tend to go to public schools that have low standardized test scores.
This report analyzes Census data and voting trends on a state-by-state basis to explore the potential of Latinos to be a “swing vote” in the 2008 presidential election.
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