Hispanic participation in bachelor’s degrees among the physical sciences and engineering has grown at encouraging rates between 2002 and 2012. The Statistical Research Center recently released a focus on report detailing growth rates in bachelor’s degrees for Hispanics in the United States across 15 physical science and engineering fields. In the physical sciences there was an increase of 77% from 2002 to 2012. Degree rates increased for all of the identified fields of engineering, accounting for an overall increase of 64% during the last decade. These rates exceed the population growth of Hispanics in the United States over the same time period. In nine of the fields of study, including physics, bachelor’s degrees earned by Hispanics more than doubled from 2002 to 2012.
While Hispanics are still underrepresented among degree recipients, they are advancing across the physical sciences and engineering. Specifically in engineering technology and civil, electrical, and industrial engineering, Hispanics are now earning bachelor’s degrees at approximately the same proportion as the total US population. Among bachelor’s degrees recipients, however, Hispanics are least represented proportionally in astronomy, atmospheric sciences, and earth sciences. The bachelor’s degree data in this report were collected by the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) and analyzed by staff at SRC.
