Gaps in Immigrants’ Education Levels Play Into Canada’s Edge Over U.S. in Rankings, Researchers Say

One key reason that Canada fares better than the United States in international measures of college attainment is that it takes in a better-educated mix of immigrants and does better in educating their children, two representatives of a scholarship foundation established by the Canadian government told an audience here Thursday at the annual conference of the Association for the Study of Higher Education.

Andrew Parkin, associate executive director of the Canada Millennium Scholarship Foundation, and Noel Baldwin, a policy and research officer there, stressed during their presentations that other factors contribute to Canada’s higher college-going rate. Chief among them are the more equitable distribution of income in Canada, which leaves fewer of the nation’s children growing up disadvantaged, and the greater college access offered by the Canadian higher-education system through its lower university tuitions and relative abundance of two-year colleges.

But the foundation representatives cited differences in the academic success of immigrants and their children as one of the primary reasons that Canada is faring better. Although a larger share of Canada’s population is foreign-born—about 20 percent, compared to 12 percent in the U.S.—the regions of origin are much different. About 52 percent of U.S. immigrants, and 11 percent of Canadian immigrants, come from Latin America, and about 14 percent of U.S. immigrants and 37 percent of Canadian immigrants come from Europe. People from Asia and the Middle East also account for a larger share of the Canadian immigrant stream.

About a third of immigrants in the United States over the age of 25 do not have a high-school diploma, compared to just over one-10th of Canadian immigrants ages 25 to 54, according to the censuses for the two countries. And while the children of Canada’s immigrants do better than the immigrants themselves on tests administered by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s Program for International Student Assessment, the children of America’s immigrants fare worse, on the whole, than the immigrants, the foundation officials noted.