NYT/AP: Income Gaps Found Among the College-Educated

[DeepModem Mom]

Income Gaps Found Among the College-Educated
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Published: March 28, 2005


WASHINGTON, March 28 (AP) - Black and Asian women with bachelor's degrees earn slightly more than similarly educated white women, and white men with four-year degrees make more than anyone else.

A white woman with a bachelor's degree typically earned $37,800 in 2003, compared with $43,700 for a college-educated Asian woman and $41,100 for a black woman, according to data to be released Monday by the Census Bureau. Hispanic women took home $37,600 a year.

The bureau did not say why the differences exist. Economists and sociologists suggest several possible factors: the tendency of minority women, especially blacks, to more often hold more than one job or work more than 40 hours a week, and the tendency of black professional women who take time off to have a child to return to the work force sooner than others.

Employers in some fields may give financial incentives to young black women, who graduate from college at higher rates than young black men, said Roderick Harrison, a researcher at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a research organization in Washington.

A white male with a college diploma earns far more than any similarly educated man or woman - $66,000 a year, the Census Bureau said. Among men with bachelor's degrees, Asians earned $52,000 a year, Hispanics $49,000 and blacks $45,000....


http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/28/education/28income.html

[DBoon]

1. Important News!

College graduates with wealthy parents make more money out of college than other graduates!

Innate ability found to matter little in the job market!

More news at 11!

[Rose Siding]

2. I doubt that minority women's parents...

are wealthier than white women's parents, as a rule.

[JohnnyBoots]

5. Too bad my folks are teachers

I am a white college educated male and I can barely keep my head above water. Maybe I shouldn't have majored in Anthropology....

[Mizmoon]

6. I hate when people say that

I majored in history and make a very nice living. It's not the degree, it's the ambition of the person who holds it.

[Autobot77]

18. May I ask what you did to get where you are Mizmoon?

I think ambition does play a small role, though its mostly who you know.

[JohnnyBoots]

19. To defend myself

I am running a tutoring program in Appalachian WV teaching little red staters how to read and write for Americorps, so it is my own fault that I make peanuts. Next stop will definitely be an affluent private school, my altruism only goes so far.

[DeepModem Mom]

11. Hi, JB -- welcome to DU! ( History major here.)

[Logansquare]

14. My (white) husband did that

and he went back to school and got a professional degree. He made 15K more than he ever did before in the year after graduation.

[Autobot77]

17. I know what you mean...

I was an art major

[newyawker99]

20. Hi JohnnyBoots!!

Welcome to DU!! :toast:

[zalinda]

3. This is too easy

It's all about quotas.......minority women count in 2 categories, being a woman and being non-white.

zalinda

[w4rma]

4. It can't be about quotas. Quotas are illegal.

You can't make quotas *more* illegal. They are illegal.

[megatherium]

8. I suspect Asian women are earning well because

they are majoring in technical areas (engineering, etc) more than non-minority women. Many women major in stuff like elementary education, which is not known for high salaries.

[AirAmFan]

7. These are apples-oranges comparisons!

Or, maybe, more precisely, Grade-A apple / whole-barrel comparisons.

For example, it's not fair to compare African-Americans with college degrees to ALL whites with college degrees, because the proportion of African-Americans with college degrees is only 17/30 ths the proportion of whites with college degrees.

Unless you're a racist, you must recognize that educational opportunity is not distributed equally in this country, and you must believe that ability IS distributed equally among races.

Go to http://www.census.gov , click on 'E', for Educational Attainment, and you will find a 2003 report that says 30 percent of whites age 25 and older have college degrees, but only 17 percent of African-Americans.

A much fairer comparison would be all African-Americans with college degrees against the top 17/30ths of whites with college degrees. If someone tried that, they'd get very different results from what's reported in your article.

[Morose]

9. I suppose that not caring = some sort of unforgivable

insensitivity somewhere but frankly I have seen so many polls that don't control for region, major, age, etc that I just can't get all jumped up about it. I have multiple degrees and make less than just about everyone I know (degreed or not). But I love my work and don't spend my time counting all the pennies someone else has up on me.

Now if there's some sort of meaningful TREND here...or if some new policy just radically altered the results here then maybe I'll avoid yawning. Till then, I really see just another gross, overly simplified survey that doesn't actually report anything valuable, but which still manages to snag a headline.

What we make with our college degrees matters not at all if our entire country is quickly dividing along a 99/1% economic class line. If we don't use our education to close the LARGE disparity in wealth and power, these academic arguments about middle class wages will go the way of way of the dinosaur. Both will be extinct.

[skeptikal]

10. Glad that I didn't go to college..........................................

I can't see spending the money for a college education in order to earn no more than that.
I passed the white guy several years ago.

[DeepModem Mom]

12. Hi, skeptikal -- welcome to DU!

[Logansquare]

13. Lots of explanations for black/white disparity

White women are often married to white men. White males are the highest average wage earners, thus a higher percentage of white women can afford to be underemployed or employed for only part of the year. I don't mean to minimize the experience of white women who are struggling to raise a family on their own with a pink-collar job, but I think the average is skewed downward by families with a high earning white male.

The higher averages for Asian women could be attributable to cultural pressures more than total family income. Most of my Asian friends who are first or second generation report that their families pushed for high grades and professional degrees. Getting a B.A. in English was not encouraged. One friend went to library school and has a prestigious job in a business library, but her parents were bitterly disappointed that she hadn't gone to business school as they had wished.

[Xithras]

16. Nail, Head, Contact.

My wife is a college grad who exemplifies your point exactly. She could easily be making two to three times her current salary, but chooses not to in order to keep her five hour a day, fifteen minutes from the house gig. She can get away with this only because I work 60 hours a week and bring home a fairly high salary. If I weren't here, her income would probably be far higher.

Minority populations with lower percentages of intact, two income households are far more likely to see women outearn their married counterparts simply because they HAVE to in order to pay the mortgage and put clothes on their kids.

[XemaSab]

15. Looking into my crystal ball

I'd say ambition plays a big role among women's salaries.

I'd guess that black and asian women are more likely to pick a career path that will enable them to earn a comfortable living on their own, while white women either don't think so much about career when picking a major or after college they get jobs that are supplemented by husbands or parents. Many women at my college picked majors that sounded fun because their daddies were paying for it, or understood that they'd be working in retail after they graduated and didn't care. Also, it would be interesting to know if more white women work part time while caring for children than their ethnic minority counterparts. These numbers are close enough that even a few women getting useless majors or taking time off for children could really throw the data around.

Also, the controls for region would probably be very, very, very important. Asian people tend to live in big cities on the west coast, where the cost of living is high and salaries are correspondingly high. White people live all over the place, including in the boonies where salaries are low, but the cost of living is also low.

Hard to reach any substantial conclusion from the data given.

[enki23]

21. have they broken it down by what they have their degrees *in*?

the numbers are interesting, but i would really like to see the breakdown.