The Inter-Cohort Reproduction of Mexican American Dropouts

The Mexican American population has the highest dropout rate in the country. This paper examines the inter-cohort reproduction of dropouts hypothesis and a series of other hypotheses in the analysis of the dropout rates of native-born Mexican Americans. The paper also offers an overview of existing problems related to the measurement of dropouts. Data from the 2000 5% Public Use Microdata Sample based on 524 Public Use Microdata Areas are used in the analysis. The results show an association between inter-cohort dropout rates—areas with higher dropout rates among the native-born Mexican American 41–49 age cohort had higher dropout rates among the native-born Mexican American 16–24 age cohort. The results also support other hypotheses, but not as strongly as the inter-cohort reproduction of dropouts hypothesis. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of the results for the formation of policies and programs to reduce the dropout rate of Mexican American youth along with a discussion of the limitations of the study.     

Number of People in the United States Experiencing Ambulatory and Independent Living Difficulties

Estimating the characteristics of the “disabled” population is necessary for some governments and of interest to health researchers concerned with producing disability prevalence rates. Because generating easy-to-understand estimates of disability in the population is important, this article provides U.S. population estimates for two disability-related measures by using the 2009 to 2011 American Community Survey Public Use Microdata Sample file. The number of people who have “independent living” and “ambulatory” difficulties is calculated from a sample of 9,204,437 (representing >309 million people). The percentage for “disabled” is found to vary by racial and ethnic category, sex, age, citizenship status, educational attainment, and state-level regions divided by weather.     

Mexican Americans’ Lucky Few and Baby Boom Cohorts: How Is Relative Cohort Size Related to the Likelihood of Being Out-of-Poverty?

Generational cohorts influence individuals’ economic life chances. Retrospective analysis has found that the “Lucky Few” generation had better life chances than previous generations. We focus on Mexican Americans in the United States and offer a prospective analysis to explore how relative cohort size plays a role in the odds of their being out-of-poverty. Using Public Use Microdata Sample files from 1990, 2000, and 2010, we test the hypothesis by comparing Early Baby Boom (those born between 1946 and 1955) and Late Baby Boom (those born between 1956 and 1965) cohorts to the Lucky Few (born between 1936 and 1945) cohort. Models predicting the odds of being out-of-poverty during the peak wage-earning years indicate that belonging to the Lucky Few cohort affords Mexican Americans no economic advantage. Our findings demonstrate that the relative cohort size hypothesis may not always be generalized to Mexican American minority samples.