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Tuesday, June 29, 2004

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  The share of people with at least a bachelor's degree from college also inched up, from 26.7 percent to 27.2 percent, continuing a decades-long rise.

Though educational levels have risen for blacks and Hispanics, both ethnic groups still trail whites in most categories.

More than 89 percent of whites had graduated from high school, compared with 80 percent of blacks and 57 percent of Hispanics.

Data going back at least a decade show a narrowing of the disparity between whites and blacks, although such figures aren't precisely comparable due to changes in the way the Census Bureau tracked race and ethnic data, said bureau statistician Nicole Stoops.

In 1993, 84 percent of whites were high school graduates, along with 70 percent of blacks and 53 percent of Latinos.

Nearly 88 percent of Asians are high school graduates, but there was no historical data available from the bureau.

Meanwhile, the influx into the United States of lesser-educated Latino immigrants over the past decade has in large part kept the overall rate for Hispanics lower, said Deborah Reed, an economist at the Public Policy Institute of California, a San Francisco-based research group.

The census estimates showed that native-born Latinos were more likely than foreign-born to have finished high school. Among those born abroad, naturalized citizens were more likely to have graduated from high school than those who were not citizens.

That's evidence that many of the Hispanic immigrants who arrived in the United States in recent years in their middle-to-late teens bypassed school to get jobs, Reed said.

The data, part of the Census Bureau's annual look at educational attainment, come from a survey conducted between February and April 2003.

Nearly 50 percent of Asians hold a college degree or more, compared with 30 percent of whites, 17 percent of blacks and 11 percent of Hispanics.

Comparably educated whites still made slightly more money, with median earnings of $45,600, compared with $45,400 for Asians, $40,000 for blacks and $37,000 for Hispanics.

National median earnings for someone with a college degree, regardless of race, was $44,000.

In a couple of categories that track higher levels of education, such as those with at least master's degrees, Asians surpassed whites in earnings. That's possibly a function of the large number of highly educated Asian immigrants who arrived in the United States during the 1990s for jobs in engineering or the high-tech industry.

The figures for "white" refer to those who are not of Hispanic ethnicity. Because the government considers "Hispanic" an ethnicity and not a race, people of Hispanic descent can be of any race.

By sex, slightly more women than men have high school or high school equivalency degrees, 85 percent to 84 percent. About 29 percent of men and 26 percent of women have college degrees, both records.

Women have narrowed that gap dramatically over the last two decades as younger, more educated women slowly replace older, less-educated women in the work force, the Census Bureau's Stoops said.

© 2004 Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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