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.
well if you major in STEM or a race/gender studies program.... well you get the rest. One is going to have a career, the other is going to get “jobs” and be an indentured servant due to student loans.
An article about equality quoting stats that females get 60-70 percent of college degrees... with nothing to say about that inequality.
Sounds like something out of animal farm.
When my son was in high school, he worked for a black woman at the school who was in charge of a special program. She was a teacher who had a Masters degree in education. She wrote a recommendation for him that was filled with spelling errors, jumbled sentences, improper punctuation, and capitalization. It looked like something a 4th grader would write, or worse. I’ve seen the exact same thing where I used to work.
Affirmative Action didn’t really accomplish anything other than award degrees to those who don’t deserve them.
They also major in useless degrees such as Urban and African Studies.
Probably because they process them by their race and not academic qualifications. Just assembly line them...screwing them in the process. Makes the schools “feel good about themselves” on how enlightened they are.
True.
And there is a huge difference between achieving wealth and being employable.
A major in ‘Social Work’ or ‘Women’s Studies’ ain’t gonn’a get you a good start.
The kids drank ALLLLL the Kool Aid and still think they’re going to ‘make it’. NOT
1) Because they get college degrees from Bob’s University and Bait Shoppe.
2) Because they major in Black Studies, Grievance Engineering, and Victimology instead of anything useful.
3) Because once they get their affirmative action degree and their affirmative action job, they suck at it and become less an asset than a liability to the idiots who hired them.
Only truly stupid people don’t understand.
What is the median IQ of black college graduates? What is the median IQ of white college graduates?
Theodore Dalrymple is the pen name of a doctor in England who worked awhile in the African continent. He noted that black doctors there were not nearly so rich as the white doctors, not because they weren’t paid the same, but because their extended family moved in with the doctor and he or she was expected to support numerous ne’er-do-well relatives. Might be some of the dynamic here.
What is STEM?
This is my demographic here so I have a lot of experience with it. The original article and this critique of it are not wrong. My dad for example has always had a good income, but is constantly besieged by family members for “loans” where there is zero intent to repay. And we’re a relatively well off family, I can only imagine if you were the first to graduate.
But yes, family structure is critical. I know dozens of unmarried college educated black women in their 30’s and 40’s, good hard-working smart responsible people making decent incomes. And nearly all of them renting apartments in big cities. I know white and Asian couples in their mid-20’s, just out of college, married, homeowners in the suburbs. Who do you think is going to have more wealth when then hit 65?
And yes, some of the Freepers above targeted something that neither article did, all college degrees are not created equal. Whites and Asians tend to graduate in engineering, business or go on to professional school. A lot of blacks due to the “mismatch” caused by affirmative action, end up sliding into not nearly as lucrative liberal arts degrees.
RE: What is STEM?
STEM: Acronym for Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics
It’s cultural and not in a good way. The gangster, racist thing...
STEM = Science Technology Engineering Mathematics
I guess that would be the kind of education that I have, although I’ve never heard it referred to a STEM before.
It must be a PC term for what we used to call hard science, as opposed to the soft (artsy fartsy) science that relies more on memorization and less on deriving and calculating.
What did they major in? African American hate studies? Femenazism. Queer studies?
Excellent article. Bottom line - liberals continue to hurt blacks.
A lot of it has to do with behavior and discipline. I work in a large complex where the majority are college graduates.
Stand at at entrance to the parking garage and take a look at which demographic group drives the great majority of luxury cars (Mercedes, Lexus, etc) and which groups drive the Fords, Hondas and Toyotas.
bkmk
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