phc-2012-08-20-enrollment

Hispanic students now the largest minority group on four-year college campuses

By Richard Fry and Mark Hugo Lopez

WASHINGTON – Hispanics are now, for the first time, the largest minority group among the nation’s four-year college and university students, with the number of 18- to 24-year-old Hispanics enrolled in college exceeding 2 million, reaching a record 16.5% share of all college enrollments. As their growth among all college-age students continues to outpace other groups, Hispanics also made up one-quarter (25.2%) of 18- to 24-year-old students enrolled in two-year colleges, according to an analysis of newly available U.S. Census Bureau data by the Pew Hispanic Center, a project of the Pew Research Center. In the nation’s public schools, Hispanics also reached new milestones. For the first time, one-in-four (24.7%) public elementary school students were Hispanic, following similar milestones reached recently by Hispanics among public kindergarten students (in 2007) and public nursery school students (in 2006). Among all pre-K through 12th grade public school students, a record 23.9% were Hispanic in 2011.