While U.S. colleges have grown more racially diverse in recent years, minority students especially Hispanics still lag behind on key measures of academic progress, a new report says.
Those findings were released Wednesday in a biannual report card on minority educational attainment by the American Council on Education (ACE), with financial backing from the GE Foundation.
Overall, postsecondary educational achievement has flat-lined, meaning today’s young adults are no better educated than the baby-boomer generation, the report concludes.
“Equality in education for all Americans remains a somewhat elusive goal that we must strive to reach,” said ACE president Molly Corbett Broad.
The report pays special attention to the nation’s estimated 47 million Hispanics, including what it describes as an overlooked population in education policy Hispanic immigrant adults.
Hispanics made the largest gains and narrowed gaps with Whites and Blacks on high school completion from 1988 to 2008. Report author Mikyung Ryu called it “impressive progress.” Yet Hispanics still have the lowest high school completion rates of any group, at 70 percent.
When it comes to college, the Hispanic record is similarly mixed. In 2008, 28 percent of traditional college-age Hispanics were in college, up from 17 percent two decades earlier.
