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.
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.
A Pew Hispanic Center report based on a new nationwide survey of Latino youths and on analyses of government data examines the values, attitudes, experiences and self-identity of this generation as it comes of age in America.
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.
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.
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.
The 5-4 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in June to strike down school desegregation plans in Seattle and Louisville has focused public attention on the degree of racial and ethnic integration in the nation’s 93,845 public schools.
Since the mid-1990s, two trends have transformed the landscape of American public education: Enrollment has increased because of the growth of the Hispanic population, and the number of schools has also increased.
In addition to longstanding concerns over high school completion, policymakers are increasingly focused on disparities in outcomes between Hispanic and white college students.
A report on high school enrollment points to the importance of schooling abroad in understanding the dropout problem for immigrant teens, finding that those teens have often fallen behind in their education before reaching the United States.
A report on the characteristics of high schools attended by different racial and ethnic groups finds that Hispanic teens are more likely than blacks and whites to attend the nation’s largest public high schools.
This study was conducted by the Educational Policy Institute through a grant from the Pew Hispanic Center to provide the most up-to-date analysis of Latino achievement through postsecondary education. The study analyses the latest installment of the National Educational Longitudinal Study (NELS), begun in 1988 with eighth grade students and followed up several times, with the last follow-up survey in 2000: eight years after scheduled high school graduation.
This new study from the Pew Hispanic Center that finds that the white/Latino gap in finishing college is larger than the high school completion gap. The study reveals that Latino undergraduates are at a disadvantage in competing for college degrees because of two important factors: many Hispanic undergraduates disproportionately enroll on campuses that have low bachelor's degree completion rates, and they have different experiences than white students even when they enroll on the same campuses.
This report shows that by some measures a greater share of Latinos are attending college classes than non-Hispanic whites, and yet they lag every other population group in attaining college degrees, especially bachelor’s degrees. A detailed examination of data for enrollment shows a high propensity among Latino high school graduates to pursue post-secondary studies. However, most are pursuing paths associated with lower chances of attaining a bachelor’s degree. Many are enrolled in community colleges, many also only attend school part-time and others delay or prolong their college education into their mid-20s and beyond. These findings clearly show that large numbers of Latinos finish their secondary schooling and try to extend their education but fail to earn a degree.
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