The Determinants of Educational Attainment for Immigrants and Ethnic Minorities in the United States

Education has been the primary means of advancement for immigrants and native-born Americans throughout the 20th century. Despite the overall expansion of the educational system in the United States, not all immigrant groups and even native-born minority groups have achieved comparable levels of educational attainment as the majority population. For some groups, such as Hispanic immigrants, native-born Hispanics, Blacks and Native Americans, the attainment gap has widened throughout the century. In order to examine the gaps in educational attainment, I use a national representative data set, the General Social Surveys, from 1977-2010, with cohorts represented from 1880-1985 to assess the conditional probabilities of high school graduation, college entry and college completion for over 45,000 respondents, 16 different “religio-ethnic” groups and four immigrant generations. I analyze the data by conducting a series of multivariate logistic regressions, with the dependent variables as each level of educational attainment, conditional upon completion of the previous level. This is commonly known in the literature as the “Mare Model.” I find that for high school completion, college entry and college completion, Jews and Asians are the more likely than Whites to have attained each level, whereas Native Americans, Hispanics, and Blacks are less likely than Whites to complete each transition. First, second and third generation immigrants are more likely to graduate high school and attend college than fourth generation immigrants, but there is no significant difference between the third and fourth generation for college graduation. Other variables, such as mother’s education, also strongly affect educational outcomes.