I’m speculating, but I expect that black men graduate from college at lower rates than white men in all income quintiles. That, not white privilege, would go a long way toward explaining the outcome gap between white and black men.
Black men and women do not necessarily encounter the same amount and type of racism. For example, the “criminal” stereotype and resulting actions (e.g. having the police called on them more often than white men do, or being treated more harshly by police/judges/juries than white men accused of the same offense) are much more likely to be encountered by black men than black (or any) women.
@ucbalumnus I don’t think my son believed that the Asian students were more ABLE than he was, but rather that he wasn’t willing to work as hard (and almost all of the East Asians at his school DID work harder). I think there is a tendency for both black and white students to view themselves as competing against other students of their race. The study we are debating is horribly flawed, but it would certainly be interesting to see the results of a study that focused on race and perceived competition in education.
There’s a study showing that bar passage rates are much lower for blacks than whites. In California it’s something like 80% of whites pass, but only 50% of black law school graduates pass the bar on the first try. The bar passage rates were roughly equivalent men versus women. Economic status of the law school graduates was not a factor for first bar taking passage rates. (It was for second bar passing, due to having the ability to take BARBRI or other bar prep classes).
Obviously if you go to law school and then your entry into the profession is either delayed or denied entirely (those who never pass) your income is likely to be much less.
@roethlisburger It seems to me that there are three variables that are potentially important in predicting future success: SES, high school grades and rank, and college entrance exam scores. I doubt there would be much difference in college graduation rates between black and white students with identical class ranks, test scores, and SES.
Determining what happened to affect grades and test scores prior to the junior year in high school is another matter.
SES doesn’t usually include wealth, but family wealth is going to have a huge affect on college graduation rates. At most income levels, family income is not enough to pay for college. And black families at all income levels have dramatically less wealth.
Where’s @ucbalumnus on their soap box? If you earn over $200k/year and you can’t full pay for your kids, it’s because of the financial priorities you set. The donut hole protests too much. Even at lower income levels, it should be possible to put your kid through one of the in-state publics, even if it isn’t their dream school.
That may be so, but most kids in college do not come from families that earn over $200K/year.
Whether or not a given family is a saver or a spender, note that black families got a later start on the growth of home equity wealth (through rising real estate values on a highly leveraged investment), which is commonly inherited from one generation to the next (either through the house itself or the money that the estate gets from selling the deceased’s house). White families had the opportunity to gain home equity wealth starting in the late 1940s, but such opportunities were severely restricted for black families through the 1960s by racially exclusive covenants on houses, other housing discrimination including explicit marketing of housing developments by race and hostility to builders who wanted to build non-racially-exclusive new housing, mortgage lending discrimination, and redlining by the FHA until 1968, and continued after to a lesser extent after many of the more overt forms of racial discrimination were outlawed.
“Statistics is a dubious business.” Justice William Brennan
Y’know, sometimes people object to statistical sampling, figuring the sample is not randomly selected or is too small.
But this particular study doesn’t do statistical sampling. It doesn’t take a statistical sample of Americans born between 1978 and 1983. It counts *all of them./i
This cohort of black women attended college at higher rates than white men, but they’re down there with the white women and black men and women in the income measure.
I don’t think anyone yet mentioned another notable thing about the study findings: Native Americans’ income mobility is nearly as bad as it is for black men.
And once more, the actual study is not behind a paywall and is here: http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org/
Non-tech summary: http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org/assets/documents/race_summary.pdf
Full paper: http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org/assets/documents/race_paper.pdf
I would like to know what degrees the various groups attained. “College degree” is too broad. Obviously some college degrees garner much higher incomes than others. If white men tend to graduate with degrees in engineering, computer science, etc. then yes, they are more likely to have higher incomes than those who graduate with other types of degrees.
Exactly. Which is why we encouraged our sons to get CS degrees. And going into that field will be why their salaries will probably be fairly high, not the fact that they’re white men.
Before this gets turned into another “STEM uber alles” thread - please start one if you want to - @busdriver11 and @TatinG
https://www.forbes.com/pictures/mfg45gdkf/by-the-numbers-education-of-the-forbes-400/#4b57313c76bd
This discussion is not about the richest 400 people in the US. Your link is not relevant to the study.
And the reality is that certain degrees have higher payoffs than others. You may not like that fact, but it’s the truth. A CS graduate who goes into that field will have higher paycheck than a liberal arts major who goes into social services. It’s a fact. The degree you graduate with often makes a huge difference for your earning potential, so that is obviously a factor to consider in this study. We can’t pretend that all occupations pay the same.
Guess what? A CS major who goes into social services probably isn’t making much either, and a “liberal arts major” (whatever you mean by that…it does include Math, Statistics and all of the sceinces but not engineering, and CS is on the fence, possibly you meant Humanities) who works at Google likely makes more.
Major isn’t everything because most majors aren’t vocational.
Majors are not vocational, but it is true that percentage of CS majors that end up finding work and stays working in tech fields is higher than percentage of English lit majors that does the same… so majors do matter. Not trying to turn this into STEM Uber alles, just pointing out that it is one of the many parameters that should not be ignored.
You’re right, @OHMomof2, not everything is related to what degree you have, which is why I said, “A CS graduate who goes into that field”. It is definitely easier as far as getting a CS job, to get a degree where you have taken several programming courses, gotten the degree and had CS internships…than to get a non-related degree, not take any programming courses nor had any related internships. Many people do that, but obviously it takes some extra time and is more difficult getting into the field, unless you have spent much time on your own learning the skills. If someone is interested enough in CS to get their degree in it, it is quite likely that they will continue to pursue a career path in that.
But CS is just one STEM field, and one that doesn’t even require a degree to get into, if you have the skills. I’m taking a wild guess here that it would be hard to get a job in an engineering field without an engineering degree.
As I pointed out much earlier in the thread, I noticed that black males had higher numbers of jobs in fields such as food service and social services, while white males had higher numbers of jobs in business and tech. That certainly plays a role as far as income.
With my google example, I was actually thinking of people who work in HR, account executives, lawyers - not tech roles. And plenty of CS majors choose lower paying careers - government work, non-profits, to name a couple.
While job title/industry is relevant to income, plus college major and internships and advanced degrees and social and professional connections and what-have-you, I am not sure any of this is relevant to the study under discussion. AFAIK it looked at education level and income level and not all that other stuff. For obvious reasons.