Caucasian students follow closely.
By Deepak Chitnis
WASHINGTON, DC: A study by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, shows that students of Asian descent are the most likely to end up financially successful in the US, followed closely by white students, with the black, Latino and Native American demographics lagging behind significantly.
The study, entitled “Race for Results,” released on Tuesday, looked at the five key demographics in students across all 50 states in the US, measuring them on several factors, including reading and math proficiency, high school graduation rates, teen birthrates, employment prospects, family income and education, and local poverty levels. All this data was then compiled, and each ethnicity was given an index score from 0 – 1,000, the latter obviously being the highest and most desirable.
Asian students scored the highest, with an index of 776. Following close behind, at 704, were students of white, or Caucasian, ancestry. But the most disturbing findings of the study are just how far behind children of the other three core demographics are – Latino students scored 404, Native American (or American Indian) students came in at 387, and children of African American descent scored a very low 345.
When looking by state, around one-third of the states in the US reported scores between 0 and 332 for their African American students, while absolutely none scored any higher than the range of 500-666. Three states – Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming – didn’t even have enough data to report on the black demographic.
Asian Americans, on the other hand, is completely in the other direction. While several states couldn’t report enough numbers to register – Montana, Wyoming, the Dakotas, West Virginia, Vermont and Maine – nearly every other state in the Union reported scores in the range of either 667-832, or 833-1,000. Six states registered scores in the lower range of 500-666: Alaska, Hawaii, Nevada, Utah, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. No state measured scores for Asian Americans between 0-499.
Roughly half of the states in the US did not have enough scores to report for Native Americans, but most of the states that did registered numbers in the ranges of 0-332 and 333-499. Every state reported Caucasian numbers between 500-666 or 667-832. Latino children came in almost uniformly in the 333-499 range, with only a handful of states reporting numbers in the next highest range.
The Annie E. Casey Foundation hopes that the report’s findings will spur more rapid movement to close the gap, allowing for children of Latino, Native and African American descent to compete with children of the remaining demographics. Native American children, in particular, grow up in some of the poorest places in the nation, with reservations often struggling to fund schools and other institutions.
The report was compiled from data collected in 2012, with millions of data points used. According to the most recent census results, there are about 3.4 million children (under the age of 18) in the US, roughly 39 million white kids, 17.6 million Latino children, 10.2 million African American children, and only 640,000 students of Native American ancestry.