The Changing Educational Attainment of Ethnic Groups in the United States: 1980-2000

Franklin D. Wilson, University of Wisconsin at Madison
Salvador Rivas, University of Wisconsin at Madison
Uzi Rebhun, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

This paper describes and seeks to account for relative changes in the educational attainment of ethnic groups in the United States during the 1980 to 2000 period. We focus on the most recent decades to determine what changes have occurred in the educational attainment of ethnic groups and the role that immigration status and length of residence might have played in these changes. Motivated by the need to monitor trends in educational attainment and assess their implications for ethnic group differences in labor market outcomes, we employ a synthetic age cohort approach to decompose changes in educational attainment. Our analyses draw upon the following data sources: 1980 to 2000 IPUMS, National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), 1986-94 National Health Interview Survey (NHIS), 1979-2000 Multiple Cause of Death file (MCD), 1986 & 1993 National Mortality Followback Survey (NMFS), and the National Longitudinal Mortality Study (NLMS).