The proportion of 25- to 34-year-olds with postsecondary credentials nationwide has been rising, up from 38 percent to 45 percent since 2008, according to the Lumina Foundation, which tracks this. (Lumina is among the funders of The Hechinger Report, which produced this story.) The figure is through 2018, the most recent year for which this data is available. But the gap between the proportion of white Americans with degrees and Black Americans with degrees hasn’t narrowed during this period; it’s gotten wider, increasing from 18 percentage points to 20 percentage points. Hispanics remain roughly 25 percentage points behind whites, a difference almost unchanged since 2008. And the divide between whites and Native Americans has grown during that time, from 24 percentage points to 31 percentage points. (Asians are the most likely to have earned degrees; more than two-thirds of Asians age 25 to 34 have them.)
