Educational Attainment and Occupational Status within the Hispanic versus the Asian Group

Educational Attainment and Occupational Status within the Hispanic versus the Asian Group

We first examine the degree to which foreign birth explains the lower educational attainment of Mexicans and Puerto Ricans compared to whites. Although foreign birth is a partial explanation of group differences, family structure and parental education are more important explanatory variables. However, when we consider how the effects of nativity vary across Hispanic groups, we find that while U.S.-born Mexicans have higher educational attainment than foreign-born Mexicans, U.S.-born Puerto Ricans are no better off than foreign-born Puerto Ricans. We also find heterogeneity in the educational experiences of U.S.-born Mexicans. Those with foreign-born parents have higher educational attainment than those with U.S-born parents. Dramatic differences in educational attainment between Hispanic and non Hispanic groups have persisted over the last 20 years. By 1991, only 61% of Hispanics 20 to 21 years old had completed high school compared with 81% of non-Hispanic blacks and 90% of whites ( U.S. Department of Education 1992) Because education is a strong predictor of personal income, these differences contribute strongly to explanations of economic inequality between Hispanics and non-Hispanics. The present study investigates two sources of the difference in educational attainment between Hispanics and non-Hispanics: family background and nativity. As we show below, Hispanics have fewer of the family background characteristics that lead to higher educational attainment. In addition, Hispanics are much more likely to be foreign born, a characteristic related to lower educational attainment. Our study examines the degree to which these differences in family background and nativity explain differences in educational.

Hispanics and whites perform different types of work in the labor market.* Moreover, the occupational divide between the two largest segments of the labor force appears to be widening. The occupations in which Hispanics are concentrated rank low in wages, educational requirements and other indicators of socioeconomic status. Those indicators also show a worsening in the occupational status of Latinos and a growing gap with respect to whites during the 1990s. That is surprising because the decade was witness to the longest economic expansion in recent U.S. history. But even as unemployment was on the decline for all racial and ethnic groups, structural shifts in employment across industries contributed to a greater division in the occupational status of Hispanics and whites. These findings emerge from a research project sponsored by the Pew Hispanic Center to examine the occupational status and mobility of Hispanic workers. The study focuses on the 1990 to 2000 time period and uses data from three sources-the Census Bureau, the University of Michigan, and the National Science Foundation. Comparisons of occupational status over time and across groups of workers are facilitated by the development of a composite indicator that assigns a score to each occupation based on its experience and education requirements. Another tool developed for the study is the Dissimilarity Index that provides a measure of the difference in occupational distributions across groups of ...