Report Shows Racial Disparities in High-Paying College Majors
By Allie Bidwell, Communications Staff
Minority college students are often overrepresented in lower-paying major programs, and underrepresented in the most lucrative, according to a recently-released report from Young Invincibles.
The report found that the highest paying majors – which include fields such as engineering, computer science, math, and business – are less common for Latino and African-American students. Latino students, for example, were underrepresented in nearly all of the seven highest-paying majors, compared to their proportion of the overall student population (about 10 percent each).
Minority students, however, were significantly overrepresented in lower-paying majors with starting salaries below $40,000, such as legal and professional studies, and homeland security, law enforcement and firefighting.
“Our research shows that not only are there vast disparities in educational attainment by race, but the inequities extend to fields of study, with students of color underrepresented in the most lucrative fields,” said report authors Tom Allison and Konrad Mugglestone, in a statement. “For this reason, it is all the more important to provide students with data about outcomes at both the institution- and major-levels so that they can better [assess] which schools and fields of study will best set them up for success upon graduation.”
The authors said it’s important for data provided by the federal government – such as in the new College Scorecard – and presented in other research should be further broken down by college majors and race.
Allison and Mugglestone also note in the report that an underrepresentation of minority students in higher-paying majors could have farther reaching implications, particularly for African-American students, who are more likely to take out loans during college, and to borrow higher amounts.
“Students of color already face many disadvantages accessing and completing postsecondary education, and as we have uncovered, lag behind in completing degrees with the greatest economic returns in the workforce,” the report said. “Understanding the roots of the disparities explored above is complicated, involving centuries of racial discrimination, uneven budgetary support for our K-12 education system, social and environmental conditions, and deficits in our academic advising and student support systems. Tracking and using robust and reliable education data can shed light on this complicated issue, but our current postsecondary data infrastructure is inadequate to do so.”
Publication Date: 9/21/2015
You must be logged in to comment on this page.