Latin Americans aged 25 to 54 in Canada are more likely to hold a university degree than the non-racialized non-Indigenous population, and more than twice as likely to be working in a job that asks for a high school diploma at most. Raw POV ran the arithmetic on Statistics Canada’s June 2026 portrait and found that 78.9% of that distance disappears once the comparison is limited to people who earned their credential in the same country. The remaining fifth does not disappear, and the report does not say why.
I opened this report expecting a story about education, and the numbers pointed somewhere narrower. Latin Americans in Canada aged 25 to 54 are better credentialed than the non-racialized non-Indigenous population in the same age band: 42.1% hold a bachelor’s degree or higher, against 31.5%. That is a 10.6 point advantage. Then the same publication reports that among those degree holders who worked in 2020 or 2021, 21.8% were overqualified for their jobs, against 10.4%. The credential advantage and the employment penalty are reported in the same document.
The figures come from Portrait of the Latin American Populations in Canada: Diversity and Socioeconomic Outcomes, catalogue 89-657-X, published by Statistics Canada on 29 June 2026 and built on the 2021 Census.
What Statistics Canada counted, and who it counted
Two definitions do most of the work here, and mixing them up produces a wrong number.
The first is overqualification. In this report a person is overqualified if they hold a bachelor’s degree or higher and work in an occupation that typically requires, at most, a high school diploma. Those are categories 4 and 5 in the National Occupational Classification’s training, education, experience and responsibilities scale. Managerial occupations are excluded from the calculation entirely. The measure is not about feeling underused at work. It compares a credential against the formal entry requirement of an occupation.
The second is the base. The 42.1% education figure covers all Latin Americans aged 25 to 54. Every overqualification rate below is conditional: it covers only those who hold a bachelor’s degree or higher and who worked in 2020 or 2021, in that same age band. The two series answer different questions about different groups, and putting them side by side as though they were one population would overstate the finding. They are reported here as two separate observations, not as one chain.
The population itself: 726,820 people identified as Latin American in the 2021 Census, 2.0% of Canada, up from 251,585 in 2001. Just over a quarter, 27.8%, were born in Canada. Toronto’s census metropolitan area holds 26.5% of them, or 192,255 people, and Montreal 22.9%, or 166,510. Among those born abroad, Mexico is the most common birthplace at 13.2%, then Colombia at 12.9%, Brazil at 7.4% and El Salvador at 7.0%.
The gap splits in two when you sort by where the degree was earned
Statistics Canada publishes four overqualification rates that make a clean comparison possible. Among people who earned their degree outside Canada, the rate is 26.7% for Latin Americans and 13.4% for the non-racialized non-Indigenous population who also studied abroad. Among people who earned a Canadian degree, it is 12.7% and 9.9%.
That is a like-for-like comparison on both rows, which is what makes the next step legitimate. The gaps and ratios in the last two columns are ours. Statistics Canada publishes the four rates and does not calculate the distance between them.
| Where the degree was earned | Latin American | Non-racialized non-Indigenous | Gap, in points | Ratio |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Outside Canada | 26.7% | 13.4% | 13.3 | 1.99x |
| In Canada | 12.7% | 9.9% | 2.8 | 1.28x |
| All degree holders | 21.8% | 10.4% | 11.4 | 2.10x |
Read down the last column and the headline number stops being one number. Among people who studied abroad, a Latin American degree holder is almost exactly twice as likely to be overqualified as a non-racialized non-Indigenous degree holder who also studied abroad. Among those who studied in Canada, the multiplier falls to 1.28.
Four fifths of the gap closes, and the last fifth does not
Here is the calculation, in full, so it can be checked. The gap between the two groups is 13.3 points when both studied outside Canada and 2.8 points when both studied in Canada. The difference between those two gaps, 10.5 points, is 78.9% of the larger one. Nearly four fifths of the distance between the two populations is accounted for by where the credential was issued rather than by which population holds it.
The same movement inside the Latin American group alone is just as large. The rate falls from 26.7% for a degree earned abroad to 12.7% for a degree earned in Canada, a drop of 14.0 points, or 52.4% in relative terms.
And the residual matters as much as the closure. At 2.8 points, the Canadian-degree gap is small next to the foreign-degree gap, but it is not zero. Whatever the foreign credential explains, it does not explain all of it.
One more figure gives the finding its weight. Among Latin Americans aged 25 to 54 born outside Canada, 44.4% hold a bachelor’s degree or higher. Of that group, 32.0 points came from degrees earned outside Canada and 12.5 from degrees earned in Canada, which puts roughly 72% of foreign-born Latin American graduates on the row of the table with the wider gap. The variable that does the most work is also the one that describes most of the population.
The gap is wider among women than among men
The report breaks the overall rate down by sex, and the two halves are not alike. Among men, 19.9% of Latin American degree holders were overqualified against 11.3% of their non-racialized non-Indigenous counterparts, a gap of 8.6 points. Among women it was 23.4% against 9.8%, a gap of 13.6 points. The women’s gap is 1.58 times the men’s. Those subtractions are ours; the four rates are the report’s.
Worth noting what this comparison does not carry: the report gives these rates by sex without crossing them with where the degree was earned, so it is not possible to say from this publication whether the wider gap among women survives that control.
Latin America is not one place in this data
Treating the population as a bloc would flatten the largest differences in the report. Having a bachelor’s degree or higher was more than twice as common among Latin Americans born in South America, at 53.6%, or in Mexico, at 46.0%, as among those born in the rest of Central America, at 19.1%. Occupations diverge along the same line. Among Latin American men aged 25 to 54, 40.4% of those born in Central America excluding Mexico worked in trades, transport and equipment operator occupations, against 24.9% of those born in South America. In natural and applied sciences the order reverses: 23.3% of the South American group against 9.5% of the Central American group.
A single national average sits on top of a range that wide. It is one of the reasons the country of origin, and not the region, is the useful unit here, which is also true of the money that flows the other way: Raw POV’s earlier count found that ten of Canada’s 15 tracked remittance corridors charge more than the UN’s 5 percent ceiling, and the cost varies by destination rather than by continent.
What the data cannot show
This is a census cross-section, not a study of cause, and three limits follow from that.
People who earn a Canadian degree are not a random sample of the people who arrive with one. They tend to differ in age at arrival, in language, in the networks they build while studying, and in the immigration category that admitted them. Any of those could carry part of what the table attributes to the credential. The association is in the data. The mechanism is not.
The classification measures the formal entry requirement of an occupation, not what a job involves or pays. And the census counts a person at one moment, so it cannot show whether someone counted as overqualified later moved into a matched occupation.
What the report does establish is a measured pattern of a specific size, on a specific date, using a definition anyone can check. That is different from a claim about why. Questions of identity and belonging that sit alongside these numbers are covered elsewhere on Raw POV, in a piece on whether you can lose your heritage and another on how the words Chicano and Cholo were assigned and chosen. The census measures work and credentials. It does not measure those.
It is also worth remembering the scale under the percentages. The 192,255 Latin Americans in the Toronto area are the same people filling the city’s dance floors and street festivals, from the busiest Brazilian weekend on the September calendar to the ordinary corners of the city that Raw POV keeps returning to. A labour market statistic describes one slice of a life, and a narrow one.
Frequently asked questions
What does overqualification mean in Statistics Canada’s data?
It means holding a bachelor’s degree or higher while working in an occupation that typically requires at most a high school diploma, specifically categories 4 and 5 of the National Occupational Classification 2021. Managerial occupations are excluded from the calculation.
Are Latin Americans in Canada less educated than the general population?
No. In the 2021 Census, 42.1% of Latin Americans aged 25 to 54 held a bachelor’s degree or higher, against 31.5% of the non-racialized non-Indigenous population in the same age group. The report notes it was lower than the 51.3% it cites for most other racialized groups.
Does a Canadian degree remove the overqualification gap?
Not entirely. Among people with Canadian degrees the rate was 12.7% for Latin Americans and 9.9% for the non-racialized non-Indigenous population, a gap of 2.8 points, compared with 13.3 points among those who studied abroad. The gap narrows sharply and remains.
How many Latin Americans live in Canada?
726,820 people, or 2.0% of the population, according to the 2021 Census, up from 251,585 in 2001. Ontario is home to 42.9% of them, and the Toronto census metropolitan area to 26.5%, or 192,255 people.
Sources and method
From the source. All percentages describing the population, its education and its overqualification rates come from Statistics Canada, Portrait of the Latin American Populations in Canada: Diversity and Socioeconomic Outcomes, catalogue 89-657-X, published 29 June 2026, based on the 2021 Census of Population. The rates used here are 42.1% and 31.5% for educational attainment; 21.8% and 10.4% for overall overqualification; 26.7% and 13.4% for degrees earned outside Canada; 12.7% and 9.9% for Canadian degrees; 19.9% and 11.3% for men; 23.4% and 9.8% for women. The definition of overqualification is the report’s own. Each figure was read in the published text before use.
Raw POV’s own analysis. Statistics Canada publishes the rates and does not publish the distances between them. The following are our calculations: the 13.3 point and 2.8 point gaps; the ratios of 1.99, 1.28 and 2.10; the finding that the difference between the two gaps, 10.5 points, is 78.9% of the larger, which is the headline; the 14.0 point and 52.4% falls within the Latin American group; the 8.6 and 13.6 point gaps by sex and the 1.58 ratio between them; the 10.6 point education advantage; and the roughly 72% share of foreign-born Latin American graduates whose degree was earned abroad, derived from the published 32.0 and 12.5 components of the 44.4% attainment figure. Component shares are rounded in the source, so that last figure is approximate.
On bases. The education figure of 42.1% covers all Latin Americans aged 25 to 54. Every overqualification rate is conditional on holding a bachelor’s degree or higher and having worked in 2020 or 2021, in the same age band. The two are not compared directly anywhere above.
What this article is not. It is a reading of a public dataset. It is not immigration, career or legal advice, and it makes no recommendation to any reader about where to study or work. No causal claim is made or implied.
