Race
While the educational attainment of all races increased during the 1990s, with the gap between African Americans and non-Hispanic whites decreasing, severe differences between the races remain, especially among those with a bachelor's degree or higher. Asian Americans had the highest educational attainment of any race, followed by whites who had a higher percentage of high school graduates but a lower percentage of college graduates. Persons identifying as Hispanic or Latino, without regard to race, had the lowest educational attainment. The gap was the largest between foreign-born Asian Americans, over half (50.1%) of whom had a bachelor's degree or higher and foreign-born Hispanics, 9.8% of whom had a four-year college degree.
Hispanics and Latinos also trailed far behind in terms of graduating from high school; it was the only major group for which high school graduates constituted less than 80% of the population. This large inequality might partially be explained thorough the influx of uneducated foreign-born Hispanic Americans who had not been offered the chance to complete secondary education in their home country and who had not completed secondary education in the United States. Overall nearly half (49.8%) of Asian Americans, nearly a third (30%) of non-Hispanic Whites, 17.3% of non-Hispanic Blacks, and just over a tenth (11.4%) of Hispanics or Latinos had a four-year college degree. The same differences decrease significantly at the high school level with 89.4% of non-Hispanic whites, 87.6% of Asian Americans, 80.0% of African Americans, and only 57% of Hispanics or Latinos having graduated from high school.
The Racial achievement gap in the United States refers to these educational disparities between minority students and Caucasian students. Evidence of the racial achievement gap remains present today because not all groups of students are advancing at the same rates. The racial achievement gap has many individual and economic implications and there have been many efforts in education reform to narrow this gap.
Read more about this topic: Educational Attainment In The United States
Famous quotes containing the word race:
“[It is possible] that the race of red men ... will, before many generations, be remembered only as a strange, weird, dream-like specter, which has passed once before the eyes of men, but had departed forever.”
—James A. Garfield (1831–1881)
“The success of great scholars and thinkers is commonly a courtier-like success, not kingly, not manly. They make shift to live merely by conformity, practically as their fathers did, and are in no sense the progenitors of a nobler race of men.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“A race horse needs only a touch of the whip; a clever person needs only a hint.”
—Chinese proverb.