Immigrants’ Educational Attainment in the U.S. and Eighth District: An Update

By Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• In the U.S., the share of native-born with only a high school diploma is larger than that of immigrants, both nationwide and in the Fed’s Eighth District, but the opposite is true for graduate degrees.

• Nationwide, the shares of U.S.-born and immigrants with at least a bachelor’s degree were higher in 2024 than they were in 2018, rising 4.4 percentage points and 3.8 percentage points, respectively.

• In the Eighth District, the share of U.S.-born with at least a bachelor’s degree increased broadly between 2018 and 2024, but no such clear pattern emerged among immigrants.

A 2020 Regional Economist article looked at the educational attainment of immigrants nationally and in the Federal Reserve’s Eighth District using 2018 American Community Survey data for adults 22 and older. This blog post updates that analysis, using data from the 2024 survey and focusing exclusively on a group of selected Eighth District metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs), rather than on Eighth District states as a whole, because state-level data include many non-District communities.¹ Digging deeper, we report U.S.-born and immigrant educational attainment levels for a subset of the selected MSAs; specifically, we examine the four largest metro areas in the Eighth District. At various points, we provide comparisons between our current findings and those of the 2020 article.

Educational Attainment: U.S. and Selected Eighth District MSAs

The selected Eighth District MSAs show a higher share of immigrants without a high school diploma compared with native-born. (See the figure below.) This closely reflects the pattern for the nation as a whole, except that the share of foreign-born without a high school diploma at the District level is 2.6 percentage points lower than that for the nation. Bachelor’s degree attainment is similar between U.S.-born and immigrants in the selected District MSAs, with a difference of only 0.4 percentage points. At the national level, the gap in bachelor’s degree attainment between U.S.-born and immigrants is 2.9 percentage points. Interestingly, 19.2% of immigrants in the selected MSAs have graduate degrees, exceeding the 16% of immigrants with graduate degrees across the nation as a whole. In addition, the percentage of foreign-born with graduate degrees in the selected District MSAs exceeds the corresponding rate among U.S.-born by 6 percentage points. These features largely preserve the findings in the 2020 article: Immigrants show relatively high percentages at the lowest and highest ranges of the educational attainment spectrum.

The median personal income of U.S.-born exceeds that of immigrants both in the selected Eighth District MSAs and nationally, though the gap is somewhat narrower at the District level when compared with the nation. Read more here