Posted on 04/14/2017 7:58:30 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
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.
— Mona Charen is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
...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.
In any event:The Aspen Institute should focus on that.
The Black community should focus on that.
There are many ways to wealth in this nation. The development of wise spending, saving, and investing habits while young is, while not a guarantee, a solid path to relative wealth regardless of color, education, or income level. Most people in this country spend all that they make and then some.
Also, no one becomes wealthy because they have a college degree. By and large the wealthy are disciplined people who act with intention and plan for the future. Mindset about money is more important than formal education. College education may be an indicator of a certain measure of self-discipline, ability to think or learn, but that’s about it. Most people, even the educated, don’t understand money. You certainly don’t learn to become wealthy in college.
And that is what I, and many others, have been saying. The American Black culture is sick.
You simply cannot have an out-of-wedlock birthrate of something north of 70% for generation after generation without dire consequences across the spectrum. Even the author of this piece points to evidence that boys are often more affected by single mother households. We are seeing decades of empirical evidence of boys -now men- who exist only by the law of the jungle. This is so utterly tragic when one considers the toll of so many ruined and lost lives.
And again, I place a lot of blame on Black pastors who seem so much more interested in street cred and accumulating wealth than in preaching to these lost souls. Where are the pastors and men of God railing against the corrosive lifestyles of a sick Black culture. No, they laugh at the comedians. They laugh at the inside Black culture jokes. Shame! Shame on them!
Black culture doesn't support 'putting off today for a better tomorrow' either. Might be another spin off of broken black families...
Mine are:
Associates in General Studies
BS in Information Assurance (emphasis on cyber security)
Planning to start masters in IA by 2018
Also hold two patents in encryption, CCIE and CISSP certifications along with a handful of other CompTIA certs
It be hard to be rich when you ass be in Jail fo’ spending all dat money on lines of coke.
Because there were no more NFL-NBA contracts available? /s
A large number of successful people have college degrees... liberals believe that this means getting a college degree will make a person successful...they don’t understand correlation vs. causation. So now they hand out degrees like candy, get a bunch of people into crippling debt and can’t figure out why some people are successful and some people aren’t. It would be laughable if they weren’t actually using our tax dollars for these experiments.
Almost everyone I know lives hand to mouth, regardless of how much money they have or had coming in.
Hubby and I made pretty good money and planned for retirement. We bought a house we could afford, stayed in it and paid it off. After all these years it is no longer in the fashionable part of town that everyone else moved to but we have no house payments now and everyone else does.
I save money. It’s a good thing because we are having a $10k unexpected month. Fridge broke. Roof leaked, have to send the IRS a check, etc.
Not sure if me having a college degree in accounting has anything to do with it but we’ve done well in retirement. Because we set ourselves up for it.
Yes, I think Mona is wrong about marriage. I think she has picked confounding variables. Kids in their 20s and early 30s who divorce don’t have that many financial problems. Often they don’t have property. I don’t think marriage is the difference between financially successful black college grads and those who are not.
Nor do I agree with the FReepers who say “the bell curve.” Everyone, no matter the race, falls in somewhere on the IQ scale, but we are talking college GRADS. Those who did succeed at undergrad education.
It really depends on many factors. What was your degree? aA studies or microbiology? Did you go home after college to your old room so you didn’t have to pay rent? Or was there no room because your family can’t afford a spare room in the apartment? There are so many factors.
I am staff at a large university and I come in contact with about 24 students a day.
My observation is that most of the black female students I come in contact with are majoring in social work or education. Very few are in STEM programs or in the business school.
College doesn't set you up for a higher earnings if you don't do STEM.
My own daughter had a BA in government, made 42K a year. She went back and earned an MPH in Epidemiology (heavy in math). 6 months out she now earns 67K, is considering a position that will pay her 80K and has a clear path to 120K in 5 years.
If you want to make the money, you need to major in the hard stuff.
And in some circles, motivation and discipline are called acting white. Frowned upon.
Could it be IQ privilege?
Yes. She nails part of it. I nail the politically charged part. :)
Personally, I would never hire anyone with a degree from some obscure college with some obscure, irrelevant degree.
Could it be that the ones who have the problem are the ones who spend their time whining about inequity instead of overcoming it by performance?
There are only so many counters at the DMV to hire someone who majored in grievance studies.
Would be interesting to compare the black graduates who do well— to those grads who don’t do well.
Instead of “White Privilege” it’s really “Nuclear Family Privilege”.
And yes, “Nuclear Family Privilege” is a thing to the Left, and it’s next on their list.
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