Boston Globe: Immigrants in Mass. now likely to be more educated
Susan Strate, the Population Estimates Program manager for the Economic and Public Policy Research group at the UMass Donahue Institute was quoted in a Boston Globe article examining the education levels of Massachusetts immigrant population.
According to the Donahue Institute's analysis of recent census figures, nearly 80 percent of Massachusetts’ immigrants who arrived after 2000 have a high school diploma or some college education or a college degree, much higher than the 68 percent of those who came to the United States before 1980. The data is from the American Community Survey, a nationwide survey that covered the years 2007 to 2011 and applies to immigrants aged 25 and older.
“Clearly our more recent immigrants are more highly educated than the immigrants in past decades,” Strate says.
The share of immigrants with a bachelor’s degree or higher in Massachusetts has risen even more dramatically, from 26 percent among those who arrived before 1980 to 42 percent of those who came after 2000. While levels of education continue to rise amongst immigrants in Massachusetts, they are still less likely to have graduated high school than US-born residents; some 24 percent of foreign-born residents of Massachusetts do not have a high school diploma, compared with 8 percent of natives.
Read article: Immigrants in Mass. now likely to be more educated
March 24, 2013
