![]() 6 Whites are far more likely to hold a bachelor’s degree than blacks. Since the 1960s, rates of college graduation have increased significantly for all major racial and ethnic groups, though large gaps persist. Increasingly, a college degree is the key to financial well-being, while the value of a high school diploma has diminished markedly over time. Blacks still trail whites in college completion The chapter concludes with sections on racial differences in family structure, including non-marital birth rates, child living arrangements and marriage rates. Later sections explore various economic outcomes, including measures of family income, wealth and homeownership, poverty and unemployment. The first section examines in greater depth racial differences in educational attainment. The remainder of this chapter explores major differences in social and economic well-being across racial and ethnic groups, with particular focus on the persistence in the disparities between blacks and whites in recent decades. Taken together, these findings suggest that educational differences alone cannot fully explain the black-white gaps in economic outcomes or family structure. For example, about nine-in-ten (92%) white women with a bachelor’s degree who recently gave birth were married, a proportion that drops to 60% among new black mothers with a similar level of education. Similar racial disparities across educational levels occur across measures of social well-being and family structure. In fact, the income of blacks at all levels of educational attainment lags behind that of their white counterparts. For example, among those with a bachelor’s degree, blacks earn significantly less than whites ($82,300 for black householders vs. While education is widely viewed as the key to upward mobility for all races, the Pew Research Center analysis finds that the benefits of schooling often flow in unequal measure to blacks relative to whites. And the white-black gap in high school completion rates has almost disappeared since the 1960s, though blacks are still significantly less likely than whites to graduate from college. While blacks are more than twice as likely as whites to be living in poverty, this actually reflects a marked improvement since the mid-1970s when blacks were almost four times as likely as whites to be poor. To be sure, some economic and educational differences between blacks and whites have narrowed over time. Non-marital births are more than twice as common among black mothers as white mothers, and black children are almost three times as likely as white children to be living with a single parent. While marriage rates are falling among all racial groups, the decline has been most dramatic among blacks. Racial differences in family structure have persisted as well. And in terms of their median net worth, white households are about 13 times as wealthy as black households – a gap that has grown wider since the Great Recession. Households headed by a black person earn on average little more than half of what the average white households earns. 5 At the same time, it’s important to note that on some measures, gaps across racial and ethnic groups have diminished.Īnalyses of federal government data by the Pew Research Center find that blacks on average are at least twice as likely as whites to be poor or to be unemployed. In many ways, America remains two societies – one black and one white – as measured by key demographic indicators of social and economic well-being.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |