On the business about non-Hispanic whites being a minority by 2042, here is what a couple of scholars have to say:
“It’s a different kind of student body than we’ve known during the ’50s and ’60s and ’70s, when a lot of our education policies were shaped,” said William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution, a Washington research center.
“If we don’t invest in educating and training African-American kids, immigrants and Latino kids, we won’t have a middle class,” said Mark Sawyer, the director of the Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity and Politics at the University of California at Los Angeles. “We’ll have a very, very poor disposable class that’s largely black or brown.”[link]
Goodness! Not to worry, though. All we have to do is get the scholarly achievement of “African-American kids, immigrants and Latino kids” up to white-kid levels. No prob! …
… Er, except that we have been trying to do exactly that for decades, with very little to show for it. The black-white test gap seems to be intractable. Hispanic school success has been tracked across four generations, with depressing results (go to Samuel Huntington’s essay here and do a find on “Rodolfo”).
So… in order to ensure we don’t end up mid-century with “a very, very poor disposable class that’s largely black or brown,” we merely have to do a thing that nobody knows how to do.
Perhaps we could produce time travel, cold fusion, and personal immortality while we’re at it?