Public policy initiatives often stress education as a means of guaranteeing a well-paid, productive population. In general, a person with a college degree earns more money and has more employment opportunities than a person with only a high school degree or less. This pattern is of particular concern to immigrant communities. The adjacent graph shows the educational attainment of native-born and foreign-born populations. It shows that those born in the United States are more than twice as likely to have completed high school than the foreign-born. In contrast, the percentages of native-born and foreign-born people with college degrees are about equal. This reflects a dichotomy within the immigrant community: One group, highly skilled and college educated, can expect to compete with native-born Americans for well-paying jobs; the other group, consisting largely of less-educated migrant workers, cannot compete for the top jobs.
This dichotomy between foreign-born groups is evident in comparisons of educational attainment among those of Hispanic and Asian descent. More than 40 percent of Asians finished four years of college, compared with only 11 percent of Hispanics. Hispanics are about twice as likely as blacks and three times more likely than whites to drop out of high school.
