November 2, 2021

Dear John,

While Democrats appear to have shelved their plan to make community college free, efforts to boost postsecondary credential attainment for adults in the United States remain ongoing, including efforts to expand Pell grants for low-income students. Forty-six states also have set goals to increase the share of residents with postsecondary credentials.

The number of U.S. adults who could benefit from these proposals is large—96 million working-age U.S. adults lack postsecondary credentials, the Migration Policy Institute (MPI) estimates, with 28 million of them immigrants and the children of immigrants. As immigrant-origin adults are expected to be the main drivers of U.S. workforce growth in the coming decades, increasing the skills and opportunities available to them has significant social and labor market implications, a new MPI commentary suggests.

“Ensuring access to these credentials should be a pillar of the nation’s immigrant integration policy as it holds the promise of not only bettering these individuals’ livelihoods and lives but also of narrowing the labor market’s skills gap and promoting equity,” write researchers Jeanne Batalova and Michael Fix.

MPI estimates that 49 percent of all U.S. adults ages 16-64 lack a postsecondary credential, a figure that rises to 67 percent for working-age Latinos of immigrant origin. Given that the immigrant-origin population is more likely to be composed of racial and ethnic minorities, improving access to credentials beyond a high school diploma is also central to closing racial equity gaps, the commentary notes.

Learn more about the size, geographic distribution, and racial and ethnic composition of the immigrant-origin adult population with our latest commentary: www.migrationpolicy.org/news/equipping-immigrant-origin-workers-postsecondary-credentials.

And explore state and nationwide data with a related new interactive tool that displays this population at U.S. and state levels, by age segment, and racial and ethnic composition: www.migrationpolicy.org/programs/data-hub/charts/immigrant-origin-adults-without-postsecondary-credentials.

With thanks for your interest in our work,



Michelle Mittelstadt
Director of Communications and Public Affairs
Migration Policy Institute

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The Migration Policy Institute is an independent, nonpartisan think tank in Washington, D.C. dedicated to analysis of the movement of people worldwide. MPI provides analysis, development, and evaluation of migration and refugee policies at the local, national, and international levels. For more on MPI, please visit www.migrationpolicy.org. 

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