THE University of Missouri, which opened in 1840 and admitted its first female students in 1867, began accepting blacks in 1950. Racial tensions are still all too evident, however. Student protests at the poor handling of a series of racist incidents led to the resignation earlier this month of the university’s president, Timothy Wolfe.
The row unfolded against a backdrop of black frustration: with police violence, such as the shooting last year of Michael Brown, an unarmed black 18-year-old, in Ferguson, Missouri, but also with the persistence of black economic underperformance. The unemployment rate for blacks is twice that for whites. A larger share of whites than blacks work in skilled jobs; even within well-paid professions whites earn more per hour than black workers. The typical white household has more than ten times the wealth of the typical black household.
Blacks do worse than whites on every rung of America’s educational ladder (see chart). A smaller share of black students completes high school, a smaller share attends university and a smaller share graduates. Black students are heavily under-represented at the most selective universities, even after accounting for differences in income. Though progress has been made in recent decades on some of these measures—such as the share of high-school graduates going on to enrol in higher education—ground has been lost elsewhere. The education system is meant to be the main mechanism through which racial inequalities are eliminated. It appears to be failing miserably.
The role of discrimination in this failure is not easy to divine. Low graduation rates could reflect racism on campus, or in the years before university, or the fact that black students tend to come from poorer families. But there are a few broad channels through which bias against blacks could operate.
Black students may opt to invest less in education than peers of other races, for instance, because the returns on education are smaller for black graduates. Labour-market studies turn up all sorts of ways in which good jobs are harder to come by for blacks than whites. Job applications from graduates with names perceived to be “black” generate fewer responses from employers than those from graduates with white-sounding names. When such applications do receive responses, the jobs on offer tend to be lowlier. An intriguing paper published in 2013 argued that in the knowledge economy, interactions with skilled peers help to raise workers’ salaries, but these “spillovers” tend to boost productivity only when the workers are of the same race.
Yet while workplace discrimination is a problem, it is not so big a problem that education is not worth the effort. In a paper of 2010 Roland Fryer, an economist at Harvard University, studied three cohorts of young Americans—those aged between 14 and 22 in the years 1976, 1979 and 1997—and analysed their earnings as adults. In each cohort, blacks earned considerably less than whites: 39% less for men in the 1979 bunch, for instance, and 18% less for men in the 1997 group. Yet in each group the wage gap shrank dramatically after accounting for differences in education. Discrimination may reduce the return on work for blacks relative to whites, but it does not eliminate the return on education.
To some extent educational woes are the fault of universities themselves. College campuses can be uncomfortable places for black students. The racist incidents that sparked the contretemps in Missouri, including swastikas smeared on walls and racial epithets hurled at black students, are sadly far from unusual. Earlier this year it emerged that a college fraternity with chapters at universities around the country still used a song extolling lynching. Research suggests that as much as half of the performance gap between white and under-represented minority groups—in terms of dropout rates, pass rates and grades—disappears when students are taught by a non-white instructor. Yet in American colleges only 10% of the faculty are black, Hispanic or Native American—groups which account for more than a third of college-age Americans.
Black students are likely to seek out more welcoming environments as a result. A recent paper examining the many branches of the University of North Carolina, a public institution, found that, after controlling for parental education and test scores, black high-school students are actually more likely to go on to graduate from the university than their white peers. This is because black students are more likely to enrol in it in the first place, thanks largely to the presence within the UNC system of five historically black institutions: formerly segregated universities where the student body is still overwhelmingly black. In North Carolina, more than half of black students attending a four-year public university enrol at one of these, compared with 19% nationwide. In the same vein, studies of universities in Texas show that minorities favour institutions with lots of students from their own race.
Early and often
Nonetheless, the work of economists like Mr Fryer suggests that disadvantage before university accounts for most of the gap in achievement between whites and blacks in America. Centuries of economic oppression mean that, however much discrimination may have abated, black children tend to come into it in disadvantaged circumstances. Mr Fryer’s analysis shows that cognitive performance in infancy is basically the same for black and white children. But within just a few years, large gaps in ability develop. These gaps are not immutable. Although still substantial, they have shrunk over time. Intensive early-childhood education programmes, in particular, appear to generate lasting benefits for disadvantaged students. Working out which interventions make a difference, and building support for them, is a task at least as difficult and important as ending racism on campus.
Sources:
“Race, income, and enrolment patterns in highly selective colleges, 1982-2004”, Rachel Baker, Daniel Klasik and Sean Reardon, Centre for Education Policy Analysis, Stanford University, 2012.
“Discrimination in the credential society: an audit study of race and college selectivity in the labour market”, Michael Gaddis, Social Forces, 2014.
“Race-specific agglomeration economies: social distance and the black-white wage gap”, Elizabeth Ananat, Shihe Fu and Stephen Ross, NBER working paper 18933, 2013.
“Racial inequality in the 21st century: the declining significance of discrimination”, Roland Fryer, NBER working paper 16256, 2010.
“A community college instructor like me: race and ethnicity interactions in the classroom”, Robert Fairlie, Florian Hoffmann and Philip Oreopoulous, NBER working paper 17381, 2011.
“Public universities, equal opportunity, and the legacy of Jim Crow: evidence from North Carolina”, Charles Clotfelter, Helen Ladd and Jacob Vigdor, NBER working paper 21577, 2015.
“Apply yourself: racial and ethnic differences in college application”, Sandra Black, Kalena Cortes and Jane Arnold Lincove, NBER working paper 21368, 2015.
“The importance of segregation, discrimination, peer dynamics, and identity in explaining trends in the racial achievement gap”, Roland Fryer, NBER working paper 16257, 2010.
