Improved educational attainment does not necessarily mean improved racial equality.
Last week, researchers at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) published an incredible report that examines changes in racial inequality that have taken place since the historic Kerner Commission was delivered 50 years ago. The report notes that while African Americans have seen progress in educational attainment, income, wealth, and health, America is far from racial equality by any of these measures. Since 1968 rates of unemployment and home ownership have stagnated, and incarceration has worsened. This post examines educational attainment specifically, and why the appearance of educational progress might not be what it seems.
The education data used by the EPI comes from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) and details trends in the educational attainment of 25 to 29 year olds. These data show that both black and white high school completion rates have dramatically increased and are currently at their historical highest.
The gap between black and white high school completion rates has almost disappeared, reaching historical lows in the last few years.
At the same time, the racial gap in college graduation rates has barely budged. Young African Americans are about half as likely to have a bachelor’s degree as their white counterparts, just like they were 50 years ago as well.
The past 50 years have seen modest improvements in racial equality in education, though not necessarily economic changes brought by these improvements. To examine the relationships between education, class, and race, this post will dive into the past 30 years of the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF). These figures measure household traits and education categories refer to the highest educational attainment of a head of household.
As expected, there is a clear relationship between education level and income:
While high income of college-educated households fluctuate dramatically, the income of the other categories is much flatter and much lower. This relationship becomes less clear when race is a consideration.
The incomes of black college graduates are much closer to those of white high school graduates than they are to those of white college graduates. When wealth is examined, an economic dichotomy forms.
The graph above shows that since 2004, the median wealth of white high school graduates (green) has been greater than the median wealth of black high school graduates (orange) and black college graduates (black) combined. The wealth of white college graduates stands alone, and incredibly high.
Because white wealth is so much larger than black wealth in each educational category, and has been consistently for at least 30 years, it should be no surprise that the income and wealth gaps between black and white households have barely moved.
The current progression of the economic race disparity is not promising, and the process of education and its outcomes need to be improved for the sake of racial equality. At its current pace, black household wealth may be on track to drop to 0 dollars by 2053.
Improving schools must entail reducing our 1970 level of segregation and shrinking the racial achievement gap. Because the value of a college education is increasing relative to that of a high school one, the United States faces a 1.3 trillion dollar crisis that disproportionately burdens black students. Debt cancellation is a viable economic stimulus, and it could serve to reduce racial economic disparity. Most impactful and simple, however, would be proper reparations. As long as there is such an alarming degree of income and wealth disparity, improved rates of educational attainment do not necessarily mean improved racial equality.
All code used to process data and create graphs is on GitHub.
09 march 2018. filed under education, statistics, inequality, and race.