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Why Doesn’t College Work for Blacks?
The headline was numbingly familiar: “For Blacks, College is Not An Equalizer.” The op-ed in the Washington Post by Ray Boshara explored what he called a “troubling paradox,” namely that so many well-educated black Americans “feel so economically insecure.”
It’s a startling fact, Boshara continued, “that blacks with college degrees have lost wealth over the past generation.” White college graduates “saw their wealth soar by 86 percent” between 1992 and 2013, while black college graduates experienced a loss of 55 percent over the same period.
I made a little bet with myself as I read the piece: “Two-to-one he doesn’t talk about family structure.” Boshara is the Director of St. Louis Federal Reserve’s Center for Household Financial Stability and a senior fellow at the Aspen Institute. His piece is carefully argued and well researched. He makes some valid points, such as that black and white college graduates “share and receive wealth very differently.” Whereas white college graduates are likely to receive financial assistance from their parents, black college grads are more often the donors of funds — to struggling family members including parents — than the recipients of help themselves.
Boshara then lists some proposals for fixing the problem, like “lending circles” and “matched savings programs” to make college more affordable for black students, along with the usual calls to combat racial discrimination.
As I feared though, he avoided what I consider to be a key factor in the black/white difference. The great divide in wealth accumulation in America is founded on marriage. Married couples accumulate much more wealth than divorced or never married people do. A study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that the median married couple in their sixties had ten times more wealth than a typical single person.
An Ohio State study found that divorce decreases wealth by an average of 77 percent. Jay Zagorsky, the study’s author, counseled: “If you really want to increase your wealth, get married and stay married. On the other hand, divorce can devastate your wealth.”
Now consider the demographics of black college graduates. The overwhelming majority are women. Females now account for 66 percent of all bachelor’s degrees earned by blacks, 70 percent of master’s degrees, and 60 percent of doctorates. Women tend to desire husbands who are as educated or more educated than they are, which makes marriage more difficult for black women with higher education degrees. According to an analysis by the Brookings Institution, the percentage of black women college graduates aged 25 to 35 who have never married is 60 percent, compared to 38 percent for white college-educated women.
Further, only 2 percent of highly-educated white women had children out of wedlock, whereas 26 percent of black women with four-year degrees did.
Unsurprisingly, more black than white women marry men who have less education. The Brookings study found that only 49 percent of black, college-educated women marry men with at least some post-secondary education, compared with 84 percent of white, college-educated women. Since education is so closely tied to income, a household with two college graduates is overwhelmingly likely to make more income than a household with only one college graduate. More white and Asian couples fit this pattern. They pool more resources and hold onto their nest egg into retirement. Oh, and black couples are more likely to divorce than others.
There are many additional reasons that stable married couples accumulate wealth. Family members are more likely to loan and donate money to a son-in-law, say, than to a live-in boyfriend. Husbands and wives complement one another in wealth strategies (men tend to be risk-takers, women tend to be cautious). Married couples are healthier and miss fewer days of work. Married men seem to be more motivated to get jobs and promotions than singles. These are just some of the dozens of factors.
The bruising reality for all Americans – though, like most things, it is more stark among African Americans – is that men are falling behind. The retreat from stable families that began in the 1960s and really hit the skids in the 1980s, has now yielded adults who’ve been damaged (though not all obviously). As David Autor and Melanie Wasserman postulate, growing up in a mother only home seems to hit boys harder than girls. Thus, there are fewer “marriageable” men for those women to marry, and the cycle becomes self-reinforcing.
There’s nothing wrong in principle with efforts to make college more affordable and to focus on racial discrimination, but the real source of the black/white wealth disparity probably owes more to the marriage gap than to those things. The Aspen Institute should focus on that.
Published in General
point game match
Precisely. Most people aren’t educated from college nor do they need advanced degrees.
I’m beginning to agree with you.
I’m actually not kidding. If you want to know about history go buy a book. It’s inconceivable that you can’t find, in this day and age, a plethora of books on the topic. Why would you need to put yourself in decades of debt for someone to give you a book list? Unless you’re a stratospheric few, you should not be a history major. Get some hard skills in college and read read read on your own.
Well, I like to think I do a little more than this in my history courses, especially for undergraduates, though I’d love it if they read the books on the lists. ;)
Besides.
While I agree that you can teach yourself history, you can teach yourself anything. Per that logic, what is the purpose of teachers? Why do we even have them? They should all go do something else?
Here I’m being a little serious, too.
What do students want from their teachers?
Regardless, fewer and fewer students are choosing to be history majors, even though @thewhetherman demonstrated history majors do just fine in the general job market.
We think that the only professions in the world are STEM. Well… That’s just not true. And even if you go that route, a lot of dudes in India are really cheap and really good at math.
I took history courses in college as a supplement to my math major (I have a minor, centered around Ancient, Medieval, and Pre-Elizabethan England). I did it because I loved history, wanted the discussion, wanted the first hand perspective from someone who was responsive to questions, and desired feedback on my own perspective of history… is it well reasoned? Did I overlook a fact? Am I giving too much weight to some events and not enough in others? I wrote a paper once on Fibonacci and his introduction books to Algebra being catalysts for the rise of the merchant and middle classes of Medieval Europe. My professor liked it, though I think I had overlooked some pretty crucial facts. But I got to explore that with guidance.
There’s a reason why, historically, university was limited to those pursuing professions and the wealthy. It is expensive with very little return on investment in many subjects for the vast majority of students, however valuable and affirming learning those subjects can be.
All good points. I refer to math and engineering because I’m familiar with them. My point is that some disciplines require a lot of guidance to learn. History I’m picking on, not because you might be a history teacher which I didn’t know, but because it’s my favorite subject to read. I found that it’s very hard to compress the understanding of history into a massive number of books to read in a very short time in a classroom structure. If I read on my own pace, I learn a lot more.
I think that universities will wane in their prominence as on line learning takes hold, at least I hope so. This is for engineering as well as every other subject. I imagine just paying to take a series of tests to prove mastery of a subject being a lot better than sitting through very expensive classes in an environment more prone to teach excessive drinking than academics.
I am a history teacher. And I do think that you’re right to some degree about being able to teach yourself history–SURE!–but I also do believe that my students walk out of my classroom knowing more than they did when they first sat down in my classroom. I’ve been told that I clarify material in a way that makes it more accessible.
Frankly, effectively reading monographs is a skill that needs to be learned… a bit like reading Shakespeare, which you also don’t require someone to teach you.
A lot of people are overwhelmed by the writing style of academics until they learn how to identify a thesis and understand this is not gospel but scholarship that one must weigh.
Again, I personally think that history is a valuable subject for our society per how citizens participate in governance. I may be misremembering, but I believe Adam Smith was an advocate for public education.
Why?
George Washington wanted a national university so the elite young men of the country could be socialized into a common culture. He had never been a university student himself, but he had an idea of how this worked in other countries. Also, disunity was an obstacle that he had faced every day as a general, and it nearly kept the Revolution from succeeding. He was obsessed with the need for unity, which is also why he was so opposed to the country dividing up into political factions.
Nowadays universities serve the purpose of socializing young people into a unified body that will defend and support the administrative state against the people. There is some learning, too, in some fields more than others, but the socialization is what is important.
To a large extent, going to a four year college is just a very expensive way to prove that you can read and write. A lot of people could save a a lot of money and a great deal of trouble if we just allowed employers to test for these things.
My husband owned a couple of companies in Scotland, and he prided himself on never hiring college graduates; but-and this is huge-he tested applicants to see if they could read and write to a certain level before hiring them. And in that place, at that time, it was legal (I think) for him to do that.
The public schools in Massachusetts are supposedly some of the best in the country; I Find this terrifying, because while attending community college in Massachusetts, I read the essays written by some of our illustrious public school graduates. They didn’t know basic grammar, they didn’t know how to spell, it was really bad: to be fair, that was about 20 years ago. things may have improved since then, but we really need better K-12 education. If we had that, most of the need for college would disappear.
Unfortunately, it’s not better, so I also think that stronger K-12 education would eradicate the need for so many college graduates, for sure.
I don’t think this would eradicate the need for all college.
You would still have an elite group who would go further with their studies, and history majors would still be walking the halls of power cause… yeah. We need people who are experts on the past, so we can make policy for the future.
I don’t think it would eradicate the need for all college, either. Just most of it. If someone wants to be a physician, or an architect, or something like that, then obviously they need higher education. But many or most of the jobs which right now require a college degree don’t really require a college degree: allowing employers to do their own skills tests would open the job market to many people, and shine a light on the need for better K-12 education.
I would also say per Mona’s post–getting back to the original topic at hand–one of the problems for many minority students in higher education is that they don’t have a good foundation in K-12 education and thus struggle in some college courses. There are lots of reasons for this, but many minority kids in lower grades are particularly ill served.
Washington is my greatest hero, but not without faults. Public education has been a disaster and giving the government control of what people learn is frightening.
In many ways, Washington was the greatest president. But one can understand where he was coming from on this issue. And we had a great system that didn’t let him get the national college he wanted.
Why?
Lots of reasons comments capture most and some are just statistical. The one thing that it isn’t is racial discrimination and prejudice, except of course among liberals who have promoted the idea that blacks need special treatment because they can’t compete for wages, schools, housing. Democrats have always been the party of racism. Nothing changes but the public posture.
Women prefer for marriage men of higher or equal status. In our modern world, education makes up for a lot of that status. While not all women will marry higher status men, most women will. This is called hypergamy and is tied to a woman’s desire for security and stability.
If 66% of all Bachelor’s are given to women, only 34% are awarded to men. So for every 66 degreed women, there are only about 34 men they would consider for marriage.
Apparently, according to other statistics MC shared, black women are far less inclined to marry “down” than white women are.
I think it was Steve Pinker who isolated this metric, which still makes my brain freeze:
90% of the kids entering Harvard are raised, from birth, by a mom and dad, who had married each other before the kid was born, and remained married to each other up through the kid’s 18th birthday.
10% of black American kids are raised that way.
As if – that would be a huge improvement. They are denigrated, mocked and despised.
Thank you.
Thanks for defending us history majors. The amount of reading and writing I did way back when to get my B.A. would be considered abuse nowadays.
My daughter teaches kindergarten in a poor, 98-percent minority community. She is expected to take kids who don’t know colors or numbers and sometimes their own names, may never have seen a book or be taught the most basic manners, and see that they test at the same level as children from upper-crust schools.
Left to her own plans and ideas, I think she could do a lot, but she and her colleagues are hobbled by one-size-fits-all curricula, an obsession with testing and reporting, and wholesale changes in philosophy and goals every couple of years.
Between their disadvantages at home and the misguided education bureaucracy, these children hardly have a chance.
I agree. The industrialization of education is a major problem. I wish your daughter well though. While she is hobbled by the system, she is still doing very important work.
I think education will eventually be sorted out by the students into education that will help them further their career plans and is thus affordable because they will be able to earn the money to cover the cost of it. They will skip the rest until they are financially comfortable and can afford to become lifelong learners.
We need better high schools because in the future, that may be the last “general” education most students will ever get because that’s all they can afford.
That said, I appreciate teacher-led education partly because I am a book editor, and the manuscripts I am asked to do come to me from the Great Random Manuscript Generator in the sky. :) In other words, I don’t pick the specific books, although of course, I work only in some subjects, but those are still extremely broad parameters.
What that means is that I have gone places intellectually that I would never have gone on my own. I think that is the real value of “school” of any kind. The teacher sends the students down intellectual roads that he or she would never take. To me, that’s the most important part of it.
But it is a luxury, for sure.
Schooling is not everything. My degrees are useful but it is the 70-80 hour weeks. Working holidays and while sick. Hitting my deadlines, switching jobs when necessary. Taking chances that made my career. I get tired of hearing people talking about how their ethnic background held them down but I noticed when the time came to step up they did not. The minorities I know that did step up did just fine in their careers, the ones that did not fail like any other person. In the end training is fine but work ethic rules.
I should let this go, but….
This reminds me of the chat I have with my WWII class on the first day each time I teach it. I remind them that if what they want to know is who shot what and when at the Battle of the Bulge, then it’s a waste of money to take a university class – go buy a book. That’s not what our class is about.
Oh, we’ll study WWII – we’ll put all those books into a broader international context, but more importantly, we’ll use WWII as a vehicle for practicing reading for argument, analyzing primary sources, creating arguments that are supported with evidence, writing analytical essays that use these skills, etc. College history classes teach critical thinking and rhetorical modes of writing. That’s why history majors do well, on average, on the job market, even without further degrees – they have skills companies can use. This stuff is hard to learn on your own.
I always wonder how much women prefer to marry men of higher or equal status, and how much men don’t want to marry women of higher status. A single woman with a Ph.D. gets told an awful lot that no one but another Ph.D. will want to marry you.
Also: B******ches be cray-cray. Women who choose donor insemination in order to “start a family” also will not shell out for the vials of a man who hasn’t been to (or, more likely, isn’t presently attending) college. The genetic contributions of Ivy Leaguers fetch a premium. Provided, that is, that the Ivy Leaguer in question is at least 5’9, preferably 6′. Why this doesn’t give us all the creeps, I don’t know. What is even weirder is that very liberal, progressive, Granola-loving, Trump-is-a-bigot lesbian women…still choose tall white well-educated and successful donors. I try to remind those of my acquaintance that the category includes George W. Bush. Now that I think of it, it includes Trump too.
Just to be clear—-all B**ches be cray-cray. Including, at times, me.
Men want women who see them as vital and have a respect for them.
The fall of mankind kind of gave women a tick to want to control and rule their husbands.
It’s easier for a woman to respect her husband when he is higher status and for him to be perceived as necessary.