was 77 percent and the Hispanic rate was 56.1 per-
cent. These increases represented the continuation
of a long-term trend, as seen by the fact that the 1959
graduation rate was 46.1 percent, and only 20.7 per-
cent for blacks.
There was also a modest gain in the number of
college graduates. In 1990, 21.3 percent of white
Americans age twenty-five or older had completed
four or more years of college, in contrast to 11.3 per-
cent of blacks and 9.2 percent of Hispanics. By 1999,
the rate of white graduates had increased to 27.7 per-
cent; the rate for blacks was 15.5 percent, and the
rate for Hispanics was 10.9 percent. As in the case of
high school graduation rates, the overall increase
represented the continuation of a long-term trend.
In 1957, just 8 percent of whites had graduated from
college, whereas the rate for blacks was only 2.9 per-
cent.
The decade of the 1990’s was a period of growth
for the nation’s elementary and secondary schools.
The number of public school students enrolled in
kindergarten through the twelfth grade increased
from 41.2 million in 1990 to 47.4 in 1999. This in-
crease of about 13 percent was large in comparison
with the 1980’s, when there was almost no growth, al-
though it was small in comparison with the 1960’s,
when the number of students grew by over 20 per-
cent.
Race, Ethnicity, and Immigration During the 1990’s,
the population of the United States continued the
trend toward greater diversity. Non-Hispanic whites
made up 75.7 percent of the population in 1990, but
their percentage had declined to 69.1 percent by
- The number of African Americans grew at ap-
proximately the same rate as the general popula-
tion, remaining at approximately 12.3 percent
throughout the decade. The number of Hispanic
Americans, however, grew by more than 40 percent.
While Hispanics constituted some 9.6 percent of
population in 1990, their percentage of the popula-
tion had grown to 12.5 percent by 2000. Much of the
Hispanic growth was due to immigration, even
though Hispanic births as a percentage of total
births grew from 14.3 percent in 1991 to 19.3 per-
cent in 1999, while the percentage of white births de-
clined from 63 percent to 58.2 percent.
During the 1990’s, immigrants and their children
were responsible for almost one-third of the nation’s
population growth. The census of 2000 reported
that twenty-eight million first-generation immi-
grants were living in the United States, with more
than ten million legal immigrants having entered
the United States in the decade since 1990—a num-
ber that was larger than in any previous decade. The
census of 1990 reported that approximately 7.9 per-
cent of the population was foreign-born, compared
to 11.1 percent in the census of 2000. Approximately
25.7 percent of the immigrants were from Latin
America, whereas 26.4 percent came from Asia. The
immigration of the 1990’s can be compared with the
highest previous decade of 1901-1910, when almost
nine million immigrants arrived.
Impact Important demographic trends that had
been evolving since the late 1960’s came to fruition
in the 1990’s. The growth rate of the population de-
clined moderately, while the increase in life expec-
tancy of about two years produced much concern
about the high costs of an aging population. At the
same time, immigrants from many parts of the world
were making the ethnic makeup of the population
more diverse than any time in U.S. history. With the
increase of out-of-wedlock births combined with the
growing divorce rate, some social scientists warned
about the consequences of so many single-parent
families. Investors in the stock market did much
better than middle-class workers, and minority fami-
lies made almost no progress toward reducing the
gap between their average incomes and those of
white families. With few exceptions, the patterns of
the decade were expected to continue into the early
decades of the twenty-first century.
Further Reading
Anderton, Douglas, Richard Barrett, and Donald
Bogue.The Population of the United States.3ded.
New York: Free Press, 1997. Contains a wealth of
historical statistics until about 1993, with clear ta-
bles and cogent observations about the reasons
for changing statistics.
Farley, Reynolds, and John Haaga, eds.The American
People: Census 2000. New York: Russell Sage Foun-
dation, 2005. Detailed information and analysis
of the population at the end of the 1990’s and be-
ginning of the twenty-first century.
Klein, Herbert.A Population Histor y of the United
States. New York: Cambridge University Press,- Scholarly and readable survey of historical
demography, with an interesting chapter on the
period from 1980 until 2003.
252 Demographics of the United States The Nineties in America