In the wake of this week’s Supreme Court ruling on affirmative action, what is going on with black and Hispanic college enrollment? A Pew Research Center analysis shows that black and Hispanic college enrollment has been rising, but that both groups are underrepresented among those gaining bachelor’s degrees. Read more at FactTank.
The Census Bureau is rethinking the questions on its largest household survey 0f Americans, with the intent of weighing the usefulness and quality of the data it obtains against the difficulty of obtaining it. Those questions that do not pass the test would be dropped or changed. The agency is starting with four topics on the American Community Survey that it get the most complaints about. Read more at FactTank.
The U.S. teen birth rate is lower than it’s ever been since the government began keeping consistent records, and is less than a third of what it was in the late 1950s. What is contributing to the rapid decline? Several factors appear to be at work, including the economy and changes in sexual behavior. Read more at Fact Tank.
A rising share of mothers (29% in 2012) do not work outside the home, a trend that reverses decades of decline in stay-at-home motherhood, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of government data. The turnaround appears to be driven by a mix of demographic, economic and societal factors. Read more
The Census Bureau has released a new report exploring how Hispanics responded to the question about their race in the 2010 Census. Most of those who chose “some other race” were Latino, but the share varied among country-of-origin groups. Read more at Fact Tank.
The Census Bureau is exploring whether to create a new ethnic category on its questionnaires, for people of Middle Eastern and North African descent. The new category, requested by advocacy organizations, would be broader than the Arab ancestry data collected by the bureau since 1980. Read more at Fact Tank.
The Census Bureau is in the midst of a years-long research project on how to improve its census questions about race and ethnicity. Results are in from an experiment that offered respondents a combined race-ethnicity question for the first time. Though indications are promising, much work remains. Read more at Fact Tank.
The Census Bureau is taking a test census this year to experiment with ideas for the 2020 Census. It will try reaching people by text message, encouraging them to respond online and using “big data” to fill in details that census takers cannot obtain from questionnaires or door-to-door visits. Read more at Fact Tank.
The gap in earnings between today’s young adults with college degrees and those without them is wider than it was for previous generations, according to a new Pew Research Center report based on census data and a new nationally representative survey. The gap also has widened between college graduates and those with less education on other economic measures.
Recently released Census data indicate that the number of new marriages in the U.S. went up in 2012, reversing a three-year decline. The uptick is concentrated among the college-educated and those ages 35 and older. Read more at FactTank.
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About Pew Research Center Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world. It conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, media content analysis and other empirical social science research. Pew Research Center does not take policy positions. It is a subsidiary of The Pew Charitable Trusts.