U.S. Latinos are key when it comes the nation’s engineering and technology workforce, according to a new joint report from the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers (SHPE) and the Latino Donor Collaborative (LDC).
Ana ValdezVoyageLA
According to the report, the economic contributions the Latino community makes to the U.S. are immense. The contributions are significant enough that if the national Latino population were its own country, it would have the fifth-largest GDP in the world, $3.2 trillion, despite comprising only 19.1% of the U.S. population.
And although they make up only 18.5% of the nation's workforce, they were the cause for 73% of U.S. workforce participation growth between 2010-2020, the report noted.
Additionally, their purchasing power of $3.4 trillion in 2021 comes with 4.7% annual growth, while non-Latinos experienced only 1.9%. And as business owners, Latinos made up 50% of net new small businesses from 2007–2017.
This is all to say that the economic impact of the U.S. Latino population is not negligible. And as the U.S. anticipates a coming shortage of workers in engineering and tech – there are projected to be 10.9 million STEM job openings by 2031 – supporting and assisting this population with the obstacles in their paths may prove essential to the economic health of the country, the report stated.
"Everybody's talking about how are we going to bridge that gap," said Dr. Dayna L. Martínez, senior director of research and impact at SHPE during a Sep. 28 panel about the report. "We're here. Latinos are here to help bridge that gap. ... We're ready to bridge that gap."
A growing demographic, Latinos currently make up 25% of young Americans aged 18 and under, according to the report. And an increasing percentage of Latinos seem to be pursuing undergraduate engineering degrees, the demographic seeing a 73.6% increase in undergrad engineering enrollment rates from 2010 (9.1%) to 2021 (15.8%). For comparison, Black students and white students saw decreases of 8.5% and 19.7%, respectively.
