Black young adults also made significant gains in completing high school education over the last quarter of a century and the gap between black and white completion rates have narrowed over time. However, like whites, black completion rates appear to have stabilized in recent years. The 1999 black completion rate of 83.5 percent is significantly higher than their completion rates in every year before 1984, indicating that a greater proportion of black young adults are now completing high school than they were in the 1970s and early 1980s. Since 1990, black completion rates have fluctuated around 83 percent, and trend data over the period show that their completion rates have remained unchanged in the 1990s.

A relatively low percentage of Hispanic young adults complete high school programs. For example, in 1999, 63.4 percent of all Hispanic 18- through 24-year-olds had completed secondary schooling. Though the 1999 rate was significantly higher than the completion rate in 1972 (56.2 percent), overall, completion rates for Hispanics have fluctuated over the last quarter of a century and have shown no consistent trend over the entire period. For example, completion rates for Hispanics increased between 1980 and 1985, and then remained at the same level between 1985 and 1999. Furthermore, the 1999 completion rate of 63.4 percent was not significantly different from the 1985 rate of 66.6 percent.

As mentioned earlier, this is the second year in which Asians/Pacific Islanders were included as a distinctive group in the racial/ethnic categories being studied. Overall, Asian youth are more likely than their black and Hispanic peers to complete high school (table 4). In 1999, 94.0 percent of Asian youth ages 18 through 24 had completed high school, compared with 83.5 percent of black and 63.4 percent of Hispanic youth. White youth completed high school at a higher rate than both black and Hispanic youth and at roughly the same rate as Asians.