Whenever the subject of racial inequality in the labor market is raised — say, for instance, the higher unemployment rates or lower earnings of Black folks relative to whites in America, even among those with college degrees — those who seek to deny the ongoing reality of systemic racial barriers facing African Americans retreat to a common refrain.
“Well,” they snap back. “What can you expect when you get your degrees in Black studies or some other useless area like that?”
It’s a blatantly racist response, of course.
After all, few would question the inherent validity of a degree in European history, general American history, or coursework in the great literature of Western Civilization. Oh sure, they might question the marketability of such degrees a bit, but with nowhere near the mocking and derisive tone reserved for those who study the history, narratives, or cultures of non-white peoples.
But it’s a reply that is more than just racist; it’s also rooted in fundamental ignorance. Because, in truth, it simply isn’t the case that whites tend to get degrees in more lucrative fields than Black folks. White college students are not, by and large, getting degrees in the highest-paying areas any more than Black students are.
And few Black students are graduating with degrees in African American studies, contrary to popular belief.
No, Black and white degrees are not typically in different areas
The fact is, whites and Blacks get degrees in the same subjects at similar rates. Looking at higher-paying degree fields, 1.7 percent of white college graduates have degrees in computer science, compared to a similar 2 percent of Black students. Likewise, 1.5 percent of white graduates have electrical engineering degrees (the highest-paid degree field), but so do 1.2 percent of Black grads.
In finance, the numbers are 2 percent of all white graduates and 1.6 percent of Black folks with degrees.
Overall, 12 percent of whites and 10.3 percent of African Americans with college degrees have those degrees in the hard sciences or engineering* — a difference, but hardly sufficient to explain the substantial gaps between Blacks and whites in income or employment outcomes.
Likewise, 20 percent of white graduates and 23 percent of Black graduates hold business degrees.
Meanwhile, in lower-paying degree fields like education or the arts and humanities, whites with degrees are slightly more likely than Blacks to have those degrees in such areas.
In education, 12.5 percent of white grads, but only 10.2 percent of Black grads, hold degrees in education, while 24 percent of white and 23 percent of Black degree holders earned those degrees in various arts or humanities departments.
As for African American studies or similar fields, although there is nothing wrong with majoring in such areas, there are only a little over 9000 degrees awarded annually in various ethnic or other group studies departments, combined, with only about 1200 in African American studies, and not all of these are received by Black students.
Indeed, with roughly 200,000 Bachelor’s degrees being awarded to Black students each year, even if every single degree in African American studies were received by African American undergrads, this would represent a mere 0.6 percent of all degrees awarded to Black students annually.
With the same degree, Blacks are still more likely to be unemployed
It has long been known that the average Black person (90 percent of whom have at least a high school diploma) is less likely to be employed than even the typical white high school dropout, thanks to ongoing white racial advantages in the labor market.
Furthermore, it is only when African Americans manage to obtain an advanced degree, beyond undergrad, that they have lower unemployment than whites with merely a high school diploma.
As for Bachelor’s degrees, even when considering individuals with degrees in the same field, the privileges of whiteness are apparent. Looking at unemployment across disciplines, the racial gaps in occupational status remain stark.
The unemployment rate for African Americans with degrees in engineering and other STEM fields is 4.7 percent: 2.2 times higher than the rate for whites, at 2.1 percent. Even Asian Americans, who are more likely than whites to have such degrees, are 57 percent more likely than those whites to be out of work.
Drilling down more granularly, and looking only at more recent graduates aged 25–34 (thereby controlling for age, which might otherwise favor older whites who had been in the workforce for far longer), unemployment for Black individuals with engineering degrees remains 2.5 times the rate for whites, 2.2 times higher in computer sciences, and more than twice as high for persons with degrees in business.
Whites earn more, even in the same fields with the same degrees
As for earnings, the reality is that even when white and Black students have majored in the same subjects, whites tend to earn considerably more than their counterparts of color.
So, for instance:
- The median income for whites with computer science degrees is $113,600, while for Blacks with the same degree, it’s slightly less than $77,000: a nearly 50 percent earnings advantage for whites.
- The median income for whites with electrical engineering degrees is $124,500, while for comparable Blacks, it’s just shy of $88,000: an earnings premium of 42 percent for whites.
- The median income for whites with degrees in finance is $105,000, compared to $74,440 for Blacks: again, a 42 percent advantage for whites with those degrees.
- Although gaps are smaller in the arts and humanities, in every sub-category, whites earn significantly more than their Black counterparts.
Interestingly, the only category of degrees where earnings differences are small or virtually non-existent is in education. But this actually helps make the point about the broader reality of racial inequality of opportunity.
Education is one of the few areas where salaries tend to be relatively consistent, negotiated by unions representing most employees, and less affected by things like old boys’ networks or connections. Few people snag jobs teaching middle school by calling up the friend of a friend of one’s father, for instance, looking for the inside track on the latest job opening.
But networks and connections are crucial to most jobs in the private sector. As the saying goes, ‘who you know’ matters more than what you know. As such, the earnings gaps referenced above are likely the result of whites having greater access to more lucrative opportunities relative to their Black counterparts in the same fields.
It isn’t that companies are paying their own Black employees far less than whites with the same educational qualifications, per se.
Although that surely happens, such internal wage discrimination would be hard to hide and would likely open up employers to legal jeopardy, even if they were inclined to engage in such racially unfair treatment.
Instead, the earnings gaps between whites and Blacks with the same degrees most likely reflect the ability of white graduates to find work with more capitalized, higher-paying firms or entities.
The Venn Diagram of systemic racism
This is what we mean by systemic racism; it’s not the overt, deliberately bigoted racism so common in the nation’s past, but rather, a structured and interlocking web of forces that combine to produce significantly disparate outcomes, with or without the pernicious intent of individual persons.
Here’s how the process works:
First, we all inherit the legacy of past inequity of opportunity, which creates racially-bifurcated networks for things like jobs by largely stratifying the neighborhoods in which we grow up and the people we’re likely to meet.
Then, those pre-existing advantages for whites and disadvantages for Blacks influence the quality of K-12 schooling we’re likely to receive.
Next, the educational quality differences mean that even when Black students go to college, they are likely to go to schools that are less prestigious (not necessarily inferior, mind you, just less prestigious), which means that the networks they become part of while there will be less lucrative than the networks many whites are privy to at more prestigious institutions.
Finally, we are all deposited into the labor market, and despite holding degrees similar to one another, some will have an easier time finding opportunities than others or capitalizing on their education to the same degree, due to the aforementioned chokepoints.
Is this racism in the old school sense? No. Of course not, and no one is suggesting otherwise. But the consequences for job opportunities are essentially the same: ongoing advantages for white people and disadvantages for African Americans, which perpetuate longstanding systems and structures of unfairness.
So much for reverse discrimination and white grievance
Of course, all of the above also rebuts quite clearly the narrative of “reverse discrimination” against white people and in favor of Blacks. If this were really a thing, we would not only expect the Black unemployment rate, generally, to be closer to the white rate, or maybe even lower than the white rate (as Blacks “take” jobs away from white people), but we would be especially likely to see a higher return to Blacks with college degrees.
After all, if Blacks really received racial preference in the job market, this would be particularly true for Black job applicants with degrees comparable to those of their white counterparts. Employers would be snapping them up if the narrative of white victimization, so popular as of late, were even remotely accurate.
Conservatives love to tell liberals and progressives that “facts don’t care about your feelings” because they believe that not only are they the ones with the evidence, but that we on the left are the ones whose entire worldview is premised on mere vibes.
But as we can see from the actual data, nothing could be further from the truth. So whether or not facts care about your feelings, one thing is certain:
The right doesn’t care about facts.
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*The table in the linked report includes sub-categories in the science and engineering section that are not, strictly speaking, what most people think of as science fields, such as political science, sociology, nursing, etc. For a more accurate reflection of who receives degrees in the sciences (as commonly understood), I added up the numbers only in various engineering categories, as well as biology, chemistry, and mathematics, and then calculated the percentages of those combined fields for each racial group presented in the table.
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Previously Published on Medium
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