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Education Level of Asian Americans Obscures True Employment Picture
New EPI Study, "Hidden Disadvantage: Asian American Unemployment and
the Great Recession"
Release by Economic Policy Institute
June 2, 2010 - Asian Americans with bachelor’s and advanced degrees experience
higher unemployment rates than their white counterparts, but Asian
American high school dropouts have a much lower unemployment rate than
similarly-situated white Americans, a new Economic Policy Institute
report finds. In the study, Hidden
Disadvantage: Asian American Unemployment and the Great Recession,
EPI researcher Algernon Austin analyzes Asian American unemployment
nationwide and in California, Hawaii, New Jersey, New York and Texas.
The overall unemployment rate for Asian Americans 25-years-and-older
was roughly the same as that for whites in the fourth quarter of 2009.
However, the share of workers who hold bachelor’s degrees and advanced
degrees is higher among Asian Americans than among white Americans, by
10.4 and 10.6 percentage points, respectively. The unemployment rate
among Asian Americans with bachelor’s degrees is 2.5 percentage points
higher than that of whites, and the unemployment rate among Asian
Americans with advanced degrees is 1.6 percentage points higher than
that of whites.
Among less-educated workers, the opposite story emerges. A relatively
high percentage of Asian American workers—7.3 percent—did not complete
high school, compared to 4.5 percent of white workers. However, the
unemployment rate for Asian Americans who did not complete high school
is 8.8 percent nationwide, much lower than the unemployment rate for
white high school dropouts, 14.3 percent.
Overall, if Asian Americans had the same unemployment rate by
education level as whites, the Asian American unemployment rate would
have been almost a percentage point lower in 2009 than it actually was.
Asian Americans, like all Americans, have been deeply affected by the
recession. Asian Americans in New Jersey, for example, have experienced
a 5.4 percentage point increase in unemployment between the fourth
quarter of 2007 (before the recession began) and the last quarter of
2009, and Asian Americans in California have experienced a 6.0
percentage point increase in the same time period. The Asian American
unemployment rate in California—home to a third of the nation’s Asian
Americans—reached the double digits, 10.2 percent, in 2009.
More About the Study
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The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) is an
independent, nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank that researches the
impact of economic trends and policies on working people in the United
States and around the world. EPI's mission is to inform people and
empower them to seek solutions that will ensure broadly shared
prosperity and opportunity. |
