WASHINGTON — Roughly one-fourth of the nation’s kindergartners are Latino, evidence of an accelerating trend that will see minority children become the majority by 2023.
Census data released Thursday also show that Latinos make up about one-fifth of all K-12 students. Latinos’ growth and changes in the youth population are certain to influence political debate, from jobs and immigration to the No Child Left Behind Act, for years.
The ethnic shifts in school enrollment are most evident in the West. States such as Arizona, California and Nevada are seeing an influx of Latinos because of immigration and higher birth rates.
Minority students in that region exceed non-Latino whites at the pre-college grade levels, with about 37 percent of the students Latino. Latinos make up 54 percent of the students in New Mexico, 47 percent in California, 44 percent in Texas and 40 percent in Arizona.
In 2007, more than 40 percent of all students in K-12 were minorities — Latinos, blacks, Asian-Americans and others. That’s double the percentage of three decades ago.
In colleges, Latinos made up 12 percent of full-time undergraduate and graduate students, 2 percentage points more than in 2006.
Still, that is short of Latinos’ 15 percent representation in the total U.S. population.
“The future of our education system depends on how we can advance Hispanics through the ranks,” said Wil liam Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “In many cases, it’s going to be a challenge because they are the children of immigrants and their English is not as strong. Many have parents without a high-school or college education.”
Minorities are projected to become the majority of the overall U.S. population by 2042.
For minority kids, that shift is seen coming in 2023, seven years earlier than the previous estimate from 2004.
The accelerated timetable is the result of immigration among Latinos and Asians and declining birth rates among non-Latino whites.
Hispanics account for more than 23 percent of kindergartners in private and public schools, according to 2007 data.
