Racial Wealth Gap Persists Despite Degree, Study Says

[TBF]

By PATRICIA COHEN
AUG. 16, 2015

“Prior family wealth is the key,” Mr. Darity explained in an email, noting that it “shapes both income-generating opportunities and the capacity to allow wealth to grow more wealth.”

Even with tuition shooting up, the payoff from a college degree remains strong, lifting lifelong earnings and protecting many graduates like a Teflon coating against the worst effects of economic downturns.

But a new study has found that for black and Hispanic college graduates, that shield is severely cracked, failing to protect them from both short-term crises and longstanding challenges.

“The long-term trend is shockingly clear,” said William R. Emmons, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis and one of the authors of the report. “White and Asian college grads do much better than their counterparts without college, while college-grad Hispanics and blacks do much worse proportionately.”

A college degree has long been recognized as a great equalizer, a path for minorities to help bridge the economic chasm that separates them from whites. But the report, scheduled to be released on Monday, raises troubling questions about the ability of a college education to narrow the racial and ethnic wealth gap ...

More here: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/17/business/racial-wealth-gap-persists-despite-degree-study-says.html

[azmom]

1. That was a depressing read.

[TBF]

2. Sorry ...

Sadly, it's a true story.

[lumberjack_jeff]

3. They did not control for gender.

Since hispanic and black college graduates are even more likely to be women than white and asian graduates, their salaries are affected to a greater degree by the same gender-based factors of choice that reduce other women's salaries.

The gist of their conclusion may very well be truthy, but their methodology makes it useless as a template for action.

[TBF]

4. They looked at families headed by a college graduate -

you're correct that they did not indicate whether the earner was male or female. I think that would make it even more useful as a "template for action" - if female hispanic and black college graduates are the heads of their families & there is little chance of them procuring "the American Dream" (as it were) even with a college education, than why are we not implementing programs to help them? Clearly it is anything but a level playing field.