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.