Survey finds US higher on education - New Hampshire rates #1
By Genaro C. Armas, Associated Press | June 29, 2004
WASHINGTON -- More US residents than ever have high school and college diplomas, although rates still vary greatly by race and ethnicity, the Census Bureau says.
Among those 25 and older nationwide last year, 84.6 percent had graduated from high school, up from 84.1 percent the previous year, according to bureau estimates being released today.
The share of people with at least a bachelor's degree also inched up, from 26.7 percent to 27.2 percent, continuing a decades-long rise.
New Hampshire with 92 percent, Minnesota and Wyoming had the highest high school graduation rates. Texas had the lowest at 77 percent.
New Hampshire's level for bachelors' degrees was 34 percent. Nearby Massachusetts was 38 percent. West Virginia had the lowest at 15 percent.
Though educational levels have risen for blacks and Hispanics, both ethnic groups still trail whites in most educational categories.
More than 89 percent of whites had graduated from high school, compared with 80 percent of blacks and 57 percent of Hispanics.
Data going back at least a decade show a narrowing of the disparity between whites and blacks, although such figures aren't precisely comparable because of changes in the way the Census Bureau tracked race and ethnic data, said bureau statistician Nicole Stoops.
In 1993, 84 percent of whites were high school graduates, along with 70 percent of blacks and 53 percent of Latinos.
Nearly 88 percent of US Asians are high school graduates, but there were no historical data available from the bureau.
Meanwhile, the influx into the United States of lesser-educated Latino immigrants over the past decade has in large part kept the overall rate for Hispanics lower, said Deborah Reed, an economist at the Public Policy Institute of California, a San Francisco-based research group.
The census estimates showed that Latinos born in the United States were more likely than foreign-born to have finished high school. Among those born abroad, naturalized citizens were more likely to have graduated from high school than those who were not citizens.
That's evidence that many of the Hispanic immigrants who arrived in the United States in recent years in their middle-to-late teens have bypassed school to get jobs, Reed said.
The data, part of the Census Bureau's annual look at educational attainment, come from a survey conducted between February and April 2003.
Nearly 50 percent of US Asians hold a college degree or more, compared with 30 percent of whites, 17 percent of blacks, and 11 percent of Hispanics.
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