Origin Affects Immigrant Dropout Rates

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Dropout rates among immigrant students are highly dependent on the number of years the student has lived in America, according to a new study by the Pew Hispanic Center. While foreign-born teenagers account for a quarter of the nation’s high school dropouts, the Pew study found that those who arrived in early childhood have only a slightly higher dropout rate than that of native-born teenagers, which averages 8%.


“It’s commonly thought by some psychologists and sociologists that the longer youth are exposed to American society and American culture, there is a subgroup of them that fares worse,” the report’s author, Richard Fry, said. “My report raises questions about this notion that the longer you are exposed to youth culture and norms the worse you fare.”


The report also found that dropout rates are strongly dependent on the country that initially educated the student. Mexican immigrants have by far the highest overall rates, with 32.6% of recent arrivals dropping out (8.1% of early arrivals drop out). In New York, those figures are much higher. Sixty percent of Mexican young adults dropped out in 2000; the next highest dropout percentage, 35%, was among Dominicans and Hondurans. At the low end of the spectrum, just 3% of Filipino and Korean students did not complete high school.


Many Mexican and Latin American students are labor migrants who came to America primarily to find work and already faced educational difficulties in their home countries. This is one explanation for the high dropout rates seen in those communities.


While the Pew study suggests that the students fare better the longer they are in the American school system, other scholars argue the opposite is the case.


“Recent immigrants are performing at a higher level than those who have been here longer,” an urban sociologist and director of the Institute for Globalization and Education in Metropolitan Settings at New York University, Pedro Noguera, said at a conference Tuesday.


During a panel discussion of immigration and education experts, Mr. Noguera, the moderator, asked what factors lead to this dynamic. The panelists, from NYU, Harvard University, and the University of California at Berkeley, analyzed how failing American schools can hurt poor immigrant students’ educational attainment.


A chairman of the Steinhardt Department of Teaching and Learning at NYU, Robert Cohen attributed the declining results to crushed idealism. “After they’re here awhile, they see how they are treated and what their future is in terms of schools and they begin to feel less enthused about school,” Mr. Cohen said. “It’s an important commentary about how segregated our schools are, and it’s also a challenge to those involved in immigration to try to do something about it.”


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