By Rogelio Sáenz
I read with great interest the article titled “American students are no longer majority in schools” written by Jayujyoti Mullick which appeared in The American Bazaar last month on June 14. This is an interesting article but there is confusion about who actually are American students who are no longer the majority in U.S. schools.
Mullick argues that “American students who are neither Latino nor multiracial represented fewer than 50% of students enrolled from nursery school through graduate programs in 2024.” Later in the essay, Mullick reports that “Between 2012 and 2022, Hispanic students increased from 24% to 29% of public-school enrollment, while American students fell from 51% to 44%.’ Still later Mullick notes “College participation also trails that of American students, with 37.3% of Hispanic young adults ages 20 and 21 enrolled in college compared with 53.9% of their American peers.”
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Put simply, Mullick’s essay indicates that Latino students are not American. The reality is that the large majority of Latinos enrolled in school are U.S.-born. According to the 2024 American Community Survey (ACS), among students enrolled in school in 2024, 91 percent of Latinos 0-17 years of age were born in the U.S., as is the case with 88 percent of those ages 18 to 24 and 78 percent of those ages 25 to 34 years of age. Hardly non-American people! Under the current politically divisive climate along with the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign, clear demarcations have been established between the “us” and “them”—people who “belong here” and those with who “don’t belong here.” The misleading information in the essay fuels divisive fires which, for many, justifies reasons for deporting people when, supposedly, “they are actually taking over our schools!”
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The reality is that non-white, rather than non-American, students now make up the majority of students in U.S. schools. As such, non-white students consisting not only of Latinos, but also Blacks, American Indians and Alaska Natives, Asians, Native Hawaiians and Other Pacific Islanders, and multiracial people, now are the majority in K-12 and college undergraduate enrollment, outnumbering white students. In 2024, according to 2024 ACS data, whites accounted for a slight majority (50.8%) of students enrolled in graduate and professional schools. Many of these non-white students are American—either born in this country, people who are naturalized citizens, and still others who are not citizens but have lived in this country for extensive portions of their lives.
Rogelio Sáenz is professor in the Department of Sociology and Demography at the University of Texas at San Antonio. His opinions and analysis expressed here are his own and not those of the University of Texas at San Antonio.