Census Bureau Says More Latinos Finish Education

The numbers of Latinos who have completed high school or college reached all-time highs this year, a new Census Bureau report showed Tuesday, and those levels are significantly higher among young adults than older Latinos, portending a more educated Latino population in the future.

“Hispanics are still behind non-Hispanics in educational attainment,” Jorge del Pinal, chief of the Census Bureau’s ethnic and Hispanic statistics branch, said. “But the perception is that Hispanics have a very high dropout rate and no progress is being made. If you look at what is happening among 25- to 34-year-olds, you’ll see that young Hispanics are getting much closer to non-Hispanics” in completing high school and college, he said.

A record 51% of Latinos 25 and older have completed high school, up from 32% in 1970. And 10% of that group has completed college as well, double the 1970 figure. Moreover, young adults (25 to 34) have made significantly greater progress than the group overall: 62% have finished high school and 12% college.

Nevertheless, Latinos remain far below the level of their non-Latino counterparts, 78% of whom have completed high school and 21% college.

The report also showed that high rates of immigration and birth have increased the nation’s Latino population by 34% in this decade, a growth nearly five times greater than that for the rest of the country. Demographers said that it is too early to gauge whether the extraordinary increase, mostly occurring in California and Texas, will be slowed by the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act and by lower birthrates that have been recorded among descendants of immigrants.

A clearer picture of the growth trend should emerge from the 1990 decennial census, which will provide a much more precise head count than the new survey, Del Pinal said.

“Obviously, if the migration continues at this clip, we will continue to have a very large growth among Hispanics,” Del Pinal said in an interview. “Even if the migration were to slow down, the increase still would be very large because of the high birthrate. But the fertility rate does go down as the generations (of descendants of immigrants) proceed.”

Latinos total 19.4 million, an increase of about 5 million since the 1980 census. The rest of the population has grown by only 7% during the decade, the bureau said.

About half of the growth in Latinos resulted from net migration and about half from the excess of births over deaths.

Latinos are concentrated in nine states, led by California with 34% of the total and Texas with 21%. The phenomenon has strong political implications and has dramatically shaped the vote-getting strategies of presidential nominees George Bush and Michael S. Dukakis.

The census survey included these other findings:

--People of Mexican heritage are the largest Latino group, at 12.1 million. They are followed by Puerto Ricans living on the U.S. mainland, 2.5 million; Central and South Americans, 2.2 million, and Cubans, 1 million.

--The unemployment rate among Latinos was 8.5% in March, contrasted with 5.8% for non-Latinos.

--The proportion of Latino families maintained by a married couple is 70%, down from 74% when it was last measured in 1982. At the same time, the share of families headed by a woman with no spouse present increased from 26% to 30%.

--About 1.2 million of the 4.6 million Latino families were living below the poverty level in 1987. Their poverty rate was about 2 1/2 times as high as that for non-Latino families. Puerto Rican families had the highest poverty rate with 38%. Cuban families had the lowest rate, 13.8%.