This publication reproduces the keynote address delivered by the author at the annual conference of the American Association of Hispanics in Higher Education (AAHHE) in March 2009, in San Antonio, Texas. In her essay, the author discusses the significance of the growing Hispanic presence through the lens of education. To frame the challenges--and promises--of Hispanics' educational futures, she first provides a demographic retrospective, which brings into focus several features that bear on the demand for education and contours of inequality. These include the pace of population growth and diversification; the unprecedented generational transition; and aging of the majority White population. Subsequently, she provides a broad overview of recent educational trends and differentials, and discusses barriers and bottlenecks undergirding Hispanics' underrepresentation in higher education. In the interest of parsimony, she does not dwell on differences among Hispanic national origin groups. Instead, she emphasizes comparisons by nativity because these are particularly salient for understanding contemporary and future contours of educational inequality. The concluding section discusses the social and economic significance of the burgeoning second generation. To underscore the urgency of closing Hispanic-White educational achievement gaps, she considers demographic projections that highlight future challenges for the nation as the baby boom generation retires from the labor force. (Contains 14 figures, 2 tables and 5 footnotes.) [The research on which this lecture was based was supported by grants from the Ford, Mellon, Hewlett and Spencer Foundations, and benefited from research conducted for the Panel on Hispanics sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences, which the author chaired.]