May 10, 2013

Success! Hispanics no longer dropping out to work

Instead, they are killing time at community colleges waiting for the economy to improve.
As Latinos Make Gains in Education, Gaps Remain 
By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA

After lagging behind other Americans in education for generations, Latinos have significantly narrowed the gap, and last year they passed a milestone, with new Hispanic high school graduates more likely than their white counterparts to go directly to college, according to a new study. 
In an era of rising high school completion and college attendance over all, Latinos have made larger gains than other groups, the Pew Research Center reported Thursday, in a study based on data collected by the Census Bureau. By several measures, young Latinos have achieved parity with blacks in educational attainment. 
But serious disparities remain, with Hispanic students less likely than Asians, whites or blacks to attend four-year colleges or go to school full time.
As recently as 2000, fewer than half of Latinos enrolled in college within months of finishing high school. But in 2012, the figure was 69 percent, compared with 84 percent for Asians, 67 percent for whites and 63 percent for blacks. 

Hmmmhmm ... What's different between 2000 and 2012?
“This is the maturation of a big second generation among Latinos — native born, and educated in American schools,” said Richard Fry, the lead author of the report. He noted survey results showing that Latinos were more likely than white students to say that a college degree is essential to get ahead in life. ... Among the major demographic groups, Latinos remain the likeliest to drop out of high school, but that rate dropped by half in just a dozen years. 

What's different between 2006 and 2012?

Oh, yeah, there were a lot of jobs for dropouts in 2000 and 20006, but not in 2012.

So, Hispanics must be doing great on the SAT, right?
SAT Report: 77% of Latinos Not Ready for College 
By Bryan Llenas
Published September 25, 2012
Fox News Latino

Less than 3 out of 10 Latino high school seniors who took the SAT exams in 2012 are ready for college, the college board announced in a new report Monday. 
Of the 272,633 Latino students who took the standardized test, only 23 percent met the SAT benchmark score of 1550 [on a 600 to 2400 scale, or an average of 517 on a 200 to 800 scale], which shows a "level of academic preparedness associated with a high likelihood of college success."  
College board research suggests a 1550 score out of 2400 indicates a 65 percent likelihood of achieving a B- average or higher during the first year of college. 
The 23 percent of Latinos ready for college is dramatically lower than the general population. Of the more than 1.6 million total high school seniors, the most ever, that took the SAT in 2012, 43 percent were deemed college ready based on their SAT scores. 

Well, Hispanic SAT scores must be rising, right? We can look at Unsilenced Science's graphs based on College Board data. Here's the Math SAT over time (the kink in 1995 is the "recentering"). I'll display Math because language is less of an issue:
Not much is happening, other than that Asians (top yellow line) are leaving everybody else in their dust. Latinos are the flat brown line, second from blacks at the bottom. Unsilenced also graphed the the size of the gap between whites and Hispanics for all three SAT subtests. The Verbal gap is slightly bigger than the Math gap, but they are so close that  the Math gap has occasionally been larger. This suggests that language issues are not the driving force in these gaps. In contrast, Asians have a huge advantage in Math, but not in Verbal.
The white-Hispanic Gap is kind of, sort of getting a tiny bit bigger, but, as with most things involving Hispanics in America, basically not too much is going on.

16 comments:

Anonymous said...

The article is deliberately misleading. It's not 77% not ready for college. It's 77% of those who took the SAT are not ready for college. What % of students even bothered to take the SAT? They don't get into that.

Regardless, for a long time now, I've considered today's bachelor's degrees to be high school diplomas 2.x beta.

A high school graduates 50 years ago were actually literate and functional. I can't confidently say the same for today's college graduates.

Anonymous said...

I am impressed beyond measure Steve - you're firing on all 13 cylinders!!

youngalexander

Anonymous said...

Steve, are you eating or sleeping? Meth?

Jonathan Silber said...

Wow: Latinos pulling even with blacks in school!

The future for America just got brighter.

stari_momak said...

Fewer than 3 of 10, dammit!

Chicago said...

It might be a wrong assumption that Hispanics care much about gaps or want to imitate other groups. They have their own lives and many do quite well. They own their own homes, own cars, often own businesses, have plenty of food, big-screen televisions, etc etc. They prefer to get started early in life, working, getting married young. Most don't want to go to school until their mid-twenties; school up to age 16-17 is plenty for most of them. Few seem to want jobs sitting in cubicles for hours at a time staring into computer screens. They have their niche and seem to be comfortable with it.

Pat Boyle said...

I don't quite understand why Hispanics do less well that 'Natives'. Presumably the Natives are Amerindians, but so are the Hispanics. Or am I wrong?

What we call Latins or Hispanics are typically a mixture of whites and Amerindians. There are some black genes mixed in also, especially in Brazil, but not so much in Mexico.

What we call Hispanics have a very wide range of mixture proportions. In the US Senate we have Cruz and Rubio who appear to be almost solely Caucasian. Mayor Villaraigosa appears to be almost completely Amerindian. Both groups find it politically expedient to be labeled Hispanic.

I would expect that white oriented Hispanics would have average IQs like whites - about 100. Whereas Amerindian oriented Hispanics should have an average IQ of around 90.

But in the graph presented the Hispanics score lower than the Amerindians. It must be that the Hispanics chosen in this graph are heavy with people from the left side of the distribution. That could be if we selected just rural peasants rather than a broader sample. And that's what I think it must be.

Am I wrong?

Albertosaurus

David said...

>killing time at community colleges waiting for the economy to improve<

Sounds like what a lot of people, even adults, are doing back home in Tennessee.

Anonymous said...

I thought I sucked at math, but apparently I was killing it when I took the SAT, according to these averages.

- Gatsby

E. Rekshun said...

Or robbing ATMs...

In Hours, Thieves Took $45 Million in A.T.M. Scheme, NYT, 05/09/13

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/10/nyregion/eight-charged-in-45-million-global-cyber-bank-thefts.html?ref=todayspaper&_r=0

"...hackers infiltrated the system of an unnamed Indian credit-card processing company that handles Visa and MasterCard prepaid debit cards. Such companies are attractive to cybercriminals because they are considered less secure than financial institutions...The authorities said the leader of the New York cashing crew was Alberto Lajud-Peña, 23, whose body was found in the Dominican Republic late last month..."

nooffensebut said...

@ Pat

"I would expect that white oriented Hispanics would have average IQs like whites - about 100. Whereas Amerindian oriented Hispanics should have an average IQ of around 90."

The studies that I have seen suggest that Native Americans in the US and Canada actually tend to have less Native American ancestry and more European ancestry than Hispanic Americans. This is probably not the case in Latin America.

Anonymous said...

Speaking of the SAT, did you catch this story? " For the First Time, SAT Test Gets Canceled in an Entire Country", Kayla Webley, Time.com.

Sounds like widespread cheating in South Korea.

"...cancel the exam after discovering test questions circulating in test-prep centers in the country..."

Makes you wonder how much of this goes on. It's getting hard to find an honest crook.

Anonymous said...

Speaking of the SAT, did you catch this story? " For the First Time, SAT Test Gets Canceled in an Entire Country", Kayla Webley, Time.com.

"Sounds like widespread cheating in South Korea.

"...cancel the exam after discovering test questions circulating in test-prep centers in the country..."

Makes you wonder how much of this goes on. It's getting hard to find an honest crook."

It would be virtually impossible for Asian-Americans to cheat on the massive scale necessary to produce the Asian differential in math performance, year after year. Also, if they cheat on the SATs, why doesn't that show in the verbal section as well? After all, once you have a copy of the test, it's just a matter of memorization.

Anonymous said...

Taranto had this today. The Pew press release is baldly deceptive on the arithmetic--you don't even have to go further into the statistical accuracy. Of course the innumerate media published what they were told to publish.

Anonymous said...

according to unsilenced science more than 100% of asians take the test, so many asians who are not in USA take the test, how do they compare to the ones in US?

nooffensebut said...

"so many asians who are not in USA take the test, how do they compare to the ones in US?"

The College Board's annual reports do not break down foreigner scores by race, but the number of foreigners is about half the number of Asians, and the American-foreigner gap roughly overlaps with the Asian-white gap, as shown here. My (Unsilenced Science) conclusion is that Asian Americans might have a little better English skills than foreign Asian students, but math scores reflect a global Asian culture of academic success.