What is a College Degree Worth to Latinos?

I spent a day recently at Lowell Middle School, in San Antonio’s south side, talking to 6th, 7th and 8th graders about what I do for a living – or at least that’s what I was supposed to do.  The gist of my mini-spiel was this: find what you love to do then do it; and go to college. It’s a formula that’s pretty much worked for me.

For the kids at Lowell it’s a long, but not impossible, road. Education Department statistics put the road in context:

• Only half of  Latino students earn their high school diploma on time.
• Of those who do complete high school, only half are as likely as their peers to be prepared for college.
• Only 4 percent of Latinos have completed graduate or professional degree programs.

And the reward for making it through college? Good, but as you’d expect, not as good as others. A study done by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, titled What’s it worth? The Economic Value of College Majors,

demonstrates just how critical the choice of major is to Hispanic median earnings, and how Hispanics continue to be segregated by race in choice of major.

Hispanics are most concentrated in Law and Public Policy majors (10% of people in these majors are Hispanic), and Engineering majors (9%).  They are extremely underrepresented in Agriculture and Natural Resource majors (4%).

The study’s conclusion is that not all degrees are worth the same in potential earnings – but we knew that already. What we didn’t know was exactly how much they’re worth. So here’s the study’s breakdown.

The top 10 majors with the highest median earnings for Hispanics are:

• Mechanical Engineering ($70,000)
• Civil Engineering($65,000)
• Management Information Systems and Statistics ($65,000)
• Computer Science ($62,000); Electrical Engineering($60,000)
• Computer and Information Systems ($60,000)
• Chemical Engineering ($59,000)
• Architecture ($59,000); Nursing($58,000)
• Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering ($56,000).

The 10 majors with the lowest median earnings Hispanics are:

• Theology and Religious Vocations ($30,000)
• Advertising and Public Relations ($38,000)
• General Education ($38,000)
• Social Work ($38,000)
• Mathematics ($40,000)
• Physical and Health Education Teaching ($40,000)
• Biology ($40,000); Psychology ($40,000)
• Elementary Education ($40,000)
• Fine Arts($40,000).

In all of these, according to the research, Latinos make less than their White and Asian counterparts. The bottom line for the kids at Lowell and for the rest of us is that there’s still lot’s of work to be done to get more Latinos in college and to make sure they earn the same as others once they graduate.

Follow Victor Landa on Twitter: @vlanda

[Photo by: Jason Bache]