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For Immediate Release: May 15, 2023

The college degree gap between Black and white Americans was always bad. It’s getting worse

As affirmative action and diversity come under attack, inequity is widening


Patrick Ben III always knew he’d go to college, even though his parents hadn’t.

He also knew that the high school he attended on Chicago’s South Side offered few of the advantages that wealthier kids got.

There were no Advanced Placement courses, for example, and little help was available with college and financial aid applications, said Ben, who is Black.

“I understood that a lot of the things I did to prepare for college I would have to do myself.”

When he made it to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the shortcomings of his high school were even more evident. Other students from more affluent places “were sitting there in class talking about how they’ve already done this stuff, where I’m thinking, all of this is new to me.”

These things “just reminded me of what I already knew about the politics of education and the lack of resources in low-income communities when it comes to schools,” said Ben, now 22 and about to graduate and go back to Chicago to teach while pursuing a master’s degree.

“I can’t be mad that the opportunities are different,” he said, “because it’s out of my control. It’s just the way society is.”

As states push back against diversity programs, and the Supreme Court considers whether to eliminate affirmative action in admissions, a central question remains: whether the playing field has finally been leveled, especially between white and Black Americans who aspire to college educations and the higher quality of life they bring.

The answer? Not only has this equity divide failed to narrow — it’s getting worse.

“In a way, we’re in the worst of all possible worlds for civil rights, because people think a lot of problems have been solved,” said Gary Orfield, co-director of the Civil Rights Project at the University of California, Los Angeles.

In fact, Orfield said, “we’re not making progress. The gaps are huge, and there’s no prospect of them closing in the foreseeable future. We’re going backwards.”

Black college and university enrollment has been dropping steadily. Already down by 22 percent between 2010 and 2020, or by more than 650,000 students, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, it has fallen by another 7 percent since then, more recent figures from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center show.

Even though the number of white students has also declined since 2010, the difference between the proportions of white students and Black students graduating with degrees has gotten bigger, data from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center show.

Thirty-four percent of Black adults have associate degrees or higher, compared to 50 percent of white adults, according to the Lumina Foundation. (Lumina is among the funders of The Hechinger Report, which produced this story.)

“There’s a facade that’s trying to be presented that everything is okay. But we never were okay, even before the pandemic,” said Wisdom Cole, national director of the NAACP youth and college division.

Many factors account for this disparity. The biggest is cost.

The average Black household earns about half as much as the average white household, and white families have eight times the median wealth of Black families — $188,200, compared to $24,100 — a gap that also has been getting wider, the Federal Reserve reports.

Real full article here – As affirmative action and diversity come under attack, inequity is widening