In the early 1990s, American politicians saw a statistic that showed people with a college education earned more money than people without one. In politician thinking, they figured they would create a lot of sympathetic future voters by declaring a college education a 'right'. Student loans became unlimited and tuition soon followed. The strategy worked, sort of. The beneficiaries of all that money are politically so far out of the American mainstream as to be almost unrecognizable, while a lot of disgruntled students have found that when everyone gets a degree, it is no longer special, and now they need a PhD or an MBA.
And now a new generation of politicians has declared student loans are too high and must be forgiven, hoping that will create a new generation of voters for them. The cycle continues.
What has not changed is that a college education does not equal success.
Some changes in demographics have been for the better. It is not just the wealthy or the exceptional who can choose to go to college. Though there are complaints about minorities in faculty and tenure positions - blacks, Latinos, Republicans, handicapped people are far below their representation in society - at the undergraduate level things have switched frrom 40 years ago. David Merolla of Wayne State University and Omari Jackson of Colby-Sawyer College now find that American black students – irrespective of their class or background – will attend a four-year college more than white students.
The Educational Longitudinal Study used a nationally representative sample of the 2002 10th grade class until 2006. 8,116 students in total. After adjusting for differences in family background, black students at any class level are more likely than their white counterparts to attend a four-year university.
In order:
Black middle-class students
Black middle-income students
Black low-income students
White middle-class students
There is some difference in income. Though black students are most likely to go to college, they are only 15.7 percent of blacks overall. And white middle class students were less likely to go to college, but 37.5 percent of white students are from middle-class families
53.6 percent of black students are from low-income backgrounds while just 21.8 percent of whites.
That tells us that poor black students clearly regard college as a road to a better life far more than poor white students do.
But is that true? If not, we have done a huge disservice to young people who are doing exactly what American politicians told them they should be doing.
David M. Merolla, Omari Jackson, 'Understanding Differences in College Enrollment: Race, Class and Cultural Capital' Race and Social Problems', September 2014, Volume 6, Issue 3, pp 280-292 26 Jul 2014 DOI 10.1007/s12552-014-9124-3
