Fewer youth but racially, ethnically more diverse
Data show state’s child population declined from 2010 to 2020
In 1999, the Tri-city India Association launched its first
Spring Festival of India to celebrate the culture, food, clothing, music and dances of the country. That inaugural gathering was small. But over time, turnout for the annual June event has exploded, said Gurinder Garcha, a member of the Association’s board of directors.
The most recent festival in Albany drew more than 3,000 attendees and 450 children participated in about two dozen festival dances for the Southeast Asian celebration.
The event’s growth is a visible symbol of a much broader trend: an increasing Asian population in the Capital Region with notable increases among Asian youth.
Statewide, the youth population is more racially and ethnically diverse than ever, according to new U.S. Census data released last week.
New York’s youth population shrunk by 5 percent in the last decade, even as the state’s overall population grew 4 percent. The state had 211,815 fewer people younger than 18 in 2020 than it did in 2010 — the third largest decline of any state, according to the Brookings Institute, a nonprofit think tank.
But while the population of children shrunk, the number of New York children identifying as Asian, Hispanic or multiracial all increased in the last decade, census data show. The population of children identifying as white and non-hispanic decreased by 17 percent, and children identifying as Black and non-hispanic declined by 15 percent.
Census forms allow for individuals to identify an ethnicity, such as Hispanic or Latino, and, separately a race, such as Asian, Black or white.
While the majority of New Yorkers still indicated on their census forms they were non-hispanic and their race was “white alone,” 2020 was the first decennial census in which that was not the case for New York children. Fortyfive percent of New York children were identified as white and non-hispanic on the 2020 census, while 55 percent were Hispanic, of other races or multiple races.
This generation, and future ones, may reshape the state’s demographics, bringing sweeping changes from the classroom to the workforce in the years to come. It is part of a broader trend of the U.S. population at large becoming more racially and ethnically diverse, including more people identifying as multiracial.
For those tracking U.S. population trends closely, the shift in New York’s youth population did not come as a surprise.
“For the first time in 2015, we hit a threshold where in U.S. public education, U.S. schools served a majority non-white population,” said David E. Kirkland, executive director of the New York University Metropolitan Center for Research on Equity and the Transformation of Schools. “The number of white students have only decreased, the number of non-white students have only increased since 2015.”
In New York, demographic shifts in the youth population vary by region and county.
While most counties saw an overall decline in the number of children, Rockland County had a notable 13 percent increase, a gain of more than 11,200 kids. The county with the next largest increase was Orange County with a half percent increase, a gain of 478 children.
The counties with the biggest percent declines in their youth populations were Putnam, Madison and Schoharie counties. They each saw an 18 percent decrease in the number of children from 2010 to 2020, with declines of a few thousand students each.
In raw numbers, Suffolk County had the greatest decrease in its youth population with a reduction of 46,162 kids in the past decade.
Most counties saw increases in their Hispanic and Latino youth populations except in the New York City area. New York, Bronx, Kings, Queens and Orleans counties all had decreasing Hispanic youth populations, with New York County posting a 17 percent decline or a decrease of about 15,000 children.
Ivette Alfonso, a volunteer for the Capital District Latinos and president of the nonprofit Citizen Action of New York, said she believed the growth stemmed from Hispanic and Latino residents tending to have larger families and starting families at a younger age, as well as international immigration from Latin America, Puerto Rico and Cuba over the last century.
Most counties also had a growing non-hispanic Asian youth population. Albany, Saratoga and Schenectady all had among the largest percent increases in the number of Asian children of any counties in the state.
In Albany, the Asian youth population grew 59 percent, an increase of nearly 2,100 children. Only the under 18 population identifying as two or more races grew by a larger number in Albany county over the last decade. That group increased by 2,530 students.
In Saratoga and Schenectady counties, the Asian youth populations increased by 73 and 64 percent, respectively, an increase of roughly 800 children each.
HP Wang, chair of the Asian Pacific Islander American Public Affairs Association Albany Chapter, called the growing numbers of Asian residents in the Capital Region “a significant change.” He pointed to increasing numbers of Chinese immigrating as students to the U.S. since the 1980s, among other reasons for the growth.
The Asian population in the Capital region is diverse itself, including people of Chinese, Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Korean, Filipino and Vietnamese heritage, among others. But the census data available does not include that level of detail on the Asian population, nor any of the other groups.
All New York counties saw significant gains in their non-hispanic population identifying as two or more races.
Nationwide, the U.S. youth population declined by about 1 million from 2010 to 2020. That’s in contrast to the two prior decades: the U.S. gained 8.7 million children from 1990 to 2000, and 1.9 million in the decade that followed, according to Brookings. Since the 1960s, youth have been declining as a share of the overall U.S. population.
The states with the largest decreases in their youth populations in the last decade were New Hampshire, Illinois and Mississippi, Brookings found. The states with the largest gains in their youth populations were North Dakota, Utah and Idaho.
The new census data reflected a country that is becoming more diverse in part due to the non-hispanic white population shrinking for the first time since census measurements began 230 years ago.
The census also changed the way it asked people about their race and ethnicity in 2020, a factor that could have caused some shifts in the data, too.
“The U.S. population is much more multiracial and more racially and ethnically diverse than what we measured in the past,” Nicholas Jones, a director of race ethnicity research and outreach at the Census Bureau, said last week.
In the simplest terms, white residents are dying at a faster rate than they’re having children, according to the University of Wisconsin. Baby boomers are growing older, pushing up New York’s average age.
The nation has also seen low birth rates in recent years.
New York’s birth rate was lower than the average for all states in 2019, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. There may have been even fewer births this year. Brookings estimated a decline in births of about 300,000 nationwide in 2021 following the COVID -19 outbreak as families delayed their decisions to have children.
A diversifying youth population means schools, workplaces and governments may need to reconsider some of the ways they operate.
Kirkland contends the new demographics of who is a student in New York means schools need to adjust their curriculum — including teaching methods, staff and the educational environment to include a pluralistic student body.
With help from Kirkland, New York developed in 2018 a “culturally responsive sustaining education framework” to guide districts on how to imbue their educational offerings with equity and inclusion. But there’s no state accounting for which districts have implemented the guidance, Kirkland said.
“Too often the way we do and understand education is not shifting consistently with how the population is shifting,” Kirkland said. “As a result, students of color are more likely to suffer discipline procedures, exclusionary discipline which means loss of instruction. Not only that, they’re more likely to face harsher discipline. They’re more likely to be placed in special education, less likely to graduate, less likely to persist to college.”
Terry Diggory, co-coordinator of the Saratoga Immigration Coalition, said schools and governments need to try to provide more services and information in languages other than English. Public schools in particular should look to boost English as a second language service, he said.
“In the United States, our way is so many different ways because this is a county that is based on migration,” Alfonso said.