Photo by sea turtle/Flickr (Creative Commons)
At a University of Colorado graduation ceremony, May 2007
A new report out today from the Brookings Institution notes what for many might be a surprising revelation: In the United States, immigrants with college degrees now outnumber those who didn’t complete high school. From a summary of the report:
The share of working-age immigrants in the United States who have a bachelor’s degree has risen considerably since 1980, and now exceeds the share without a high school diploma. In 1980, just 19 percent of immigrants aged 25 to 64 held a bachelor’s degree, and nearly 40 percent had not completed high school.
By 2010, 30 percent of working-age immigrants had at least a college degree and 28 percent lacked a high school diploma.
Culled from census data, the report details immigrants’ educational and skill levels in the country’s 100 largest metropolitan areas. Among other things, the research found that educational and skill levels vary greatly by geography, for a number of reasons.
From the report:
Forty-four (44) of the nation’s 100 largest metropolitan areas are high-skilled immigrant destinations, in which college-educated immigrants outnumber immigrants without high school diplomas by at least 25 percent. These destinations include large coastal metro areas like San Francisco and Washington, D.C. The 30 low-skill destinations, in which the relative sizes of these immigrant skill groups are reversed, include many in the border states of the West and Southwest, as well as in the Great Plains.
Immigrants’ skill levels vary by metropolitan area due to historical settlement patterns and economic structures. In former immigration destinations, or “gateways,” with low levels of contemporary immigration such as Detroit, and re-emerging gateways such as Philadelphia, immigrants have high levels of educational attainment. In established post-World War II immigration gateways such as Houston, and minor-continuous gateways along the U.S.-Mexico border and in interior California, low-skilled immigrants predominate.
The Los Angeles area is one of these post-war gateways, tending to attract more lower-skilled immigrants, according to the report, which lists the region as having 62 high-skilled immigrants for every 100 low-skilled ones. By contrast, the Washington, D.C. area is listed as having 189 high-skilled immigrants for every 100 low-skilled immigrants.
Almost half of the immigrants with bachelor’s degrees seem to be over-qualified for their jobs, according to the report. At the same time, low-skilled immigrants have higher rates of employment and lower rates of household poverty than their U.S.-born counterparts, in spite of lower individual earnings.
