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:
“You cannot have Liberty in this world without what you call Moral Virtue, & you cannot have Moral Virtue without the slavery of that half of the human race who hate what you call Moral Virtue.”
—William Blake (1757–1827)
“Very few of our race can be said to be yet finished men. We still carry sticking to us some remains of the preceding inferior quadruped organization. We call these millions men; but they are not yet men. Half-engaged in the soil, pawing to get free, man needs all the music that can be brought to disengage him.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The complaint ... about modern steel furniture, modern glass houses, modern red bars and modern streamlined trains and cars is that all these objets modernes, while adequate and amusing in themselves, tend to make the people who use them look dated. It is an honest criticism. The human race has done nothing much about changing its own appearance to conform to the form and texture of its appurtenances.”
—E.B. (Elwyn Brooks)