Looking Backward: Census Stats on Pacific Islanders

With the New Year rapidly approaching, I wanted to share some perspective on Pacific Islander American higher educational attainment over the past couple of decades. Pacific Islanders have been immigrating to what is now the continental U.S. for around 200 years (two examples are the Native Hawaiians who worked in the Pacific Northwest and the Pacific Islander Mormons who immigrated to Utah). Also, in the case of the native peoples of American Samoa, Guam, and Hawaii, Pacific Islanders have been living on U.S. soil while later became part of the United States. U.S. Census data on Pacific Islander higher educational attainment took a while to catch up, but we do have numbers going back two decades.

Here are some of the online resources dating back to the 1990 Census:

1990s: As part of the U.S. Census Bureau's "We the People" series, the Census released a 10-page document on the demographics of Native Hawaiians and Other Pacific Islanders living in the 50 states. The document was published in 1993, and based on 1990 Census data (LINK).

• Percentage of Pacific Islanders with an undergraduate degree: 11 percent
• Percentage of the U.S. population with an undergraduate degree: 20 percent
• Percentage of "Asian and Pacific Islanders" with an undergraduate degree: 37 percent

2000: In 2003, the Census Bureau released a 12-page document on higher educational attainment in the U.S. It included attainment stats broken down by race and ethnicity (though multiracial individuals were counted as "two or more races" instead of being included in each racial group they reported). Here are the stats, which were based on Census 2000 data (LINK):

• Percentage of Pacific Islanders with an undergraduate degree: 13.8 percent
• Percentage of the U.S. population with an undergraduate degree: 24.4 percent
• Percentage of Asians with an undergraduate degree: 44.1 percent

2010: We are still waiting on the results of the 2010 Census, but we do have data from surveys and other research that the U.S. Census Bureau did between the 2000 and the 2010 Census. Here are the higher educational attainment stats reported by the Census in March 2010 in preparation for "Asian/Pacific American Heritage Month". (Here's the LINK)

• Percentage of Pacific Islanders with an undergraduate degree: 15 percent
• Percentage of the U.S. population with an undergraduate degree: 28 percent
• Percentage of Asians with an undergraduate degree: 50 percent

I'll expand on this in my next post, but that's it for now. Happy holidays!

Kawika