Nearly 53% of all Hispanic births in California are now out of wedlock, and Hispanics have the highest teen birthrate of all ethnic groups

Nationally, 42% of Latino children entering kindergarten are in the lowest quartile of reading preparedness, compared with 18% of white children. By eighth grade, 43% of whites and 47% of Asians nationally are proficient or better in reading, compared with only 19% of Latino students. Latino students’ rate of B.A. completion from the University of California and California State University is the lowest of all student groups and has slightly declined in recent years, reports the Institute for Higher Education Leadership and Policy at California State University, Sacramento. The state spends vast sums each year trying to get more Hispanics into college and to keep them there—$100 million in 2009, for instance, on the education of full-time community-college students who dropped out after their first year, according to the American Institutes for Research. Hispanic underperformance contributes to California’s dismal educational statistics. Only Mississippi had as large a percentage of its eighth-grade students reading at the below basic level on the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP); in eighth-grade math, California came in third, after Alabama and Mississippi, in the percentage of students scoring below basic. Only 56% of ninth-graders graduate in four years in Los Angeles; statewide, only two-thirds do. Unfortunately, though Hispanics will make up 40% of the state’s working-age population by 2020, just 12% of them are projected to have bachelor’s degrees by then, up from 10% in 2006. U.S.-born Hispanic households in California already use welfare programs (such as cash welfare, food stamps, and housing assistance) at twice the rate of U.S.-born non-Hispanic households, according to an analysis of the March 2011 Current Population Survey by the Center for Immigration Studies. Welfare use by immigrants is higher still. In 2008–09, the fraction of households using some form of welfare was 82% for households headed by an illegal immigrant and 61% for households headed by a legal immigrant. Hispanics made up nearly 60% of California’s poor in 2010, despite being less than 38% of the population. Nearly one-quarter of all Hispanics in California are poor, compared with a little over one-tenth of non-Hispanics. Nationally, the poverty rate of Hispanic adults drops from 25.5% in the first generation — the immigrant generation, that is — to 17% in the second but rises to 19% in the third, according to a Center for Immigration Studies analysis. (The poverty rate for white adults is 9%.) Only 55% of Hispanic male students graduated from California high schools in 2007, reports the California Dropout Research Project.