KEEPING BLACKS OUT OF SCIENCE
Too many black students are getting a ’ hopelessly inadequate K -12 education.
WHEN the late Justice Antonin Scalia pointed out last year that “it does not benefit AfricanAmericans to get them into the University of Texas [Austin] where they do not do well, as opposed to having them go to a lessadvanced school, a less — a slower track school where they do well,” he was roundly criticized by the left as a racist.
He was alluding, of course, to the “mismatch” problem that occurs when black students who are less qualified are admitted to more selective schools but do not graduate or do well at them as a result. Two recent studies, though, suggest that his words are truer now than ever.
The first comes from the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce, which found that black students are less likely to pursue lucrative majors than their white peers. According to the report, “African Americans account for only 8 percent of general engineering majors, 7 percent of mathematics majors, and only 5 percent of computer engineering majors.”
But they’re overrepresented in fields that don’t have high salaries: “21 percent in health and medical administrative services, compared to only 6 percent in the higherearning detailed major of pharmacy, pharmaceutical sciences, and administration.” Finally, it noted, “They are also highly represented in . . . [the lowpaying fields of] human services and community organization (20%) and social work (19%).”
“There’s a huge inadequacy here in counseling,” Anthony Carnevale, the director of the center and the lead author of the report, told the Atlantic.
This seems pretty unlikely. Who doesn’t realize computer engineers get paid well? The real problem is that too many tier school. But here’s the real kicker: A recent survey by the Wall Street Journal found that in “fields like science, technology, engineering and math, it largely doesn’t matter whether students go to a prestigious, expensive school or a lowpriced one — expected earnings turn out the same.”
For instance, if you go to Manhattan College, where the average SAT score is around 1620, and major in engineering, your midcareer median pay will be $140,000. If you go to Rice, where the average SAT score is 2180, and major in engineering, your pay will be $145,000.
In other words, there’s not much upside financially to going to the more elite schools. But there is a huge downside: Your chances of black students are getting a hopelessly inadequate K12 education and by the time they get to college, their best bet is to major in a subject whose exams have no wrong answers and whose professors engage in rampant grade inflation.
Carnevale also argues that’s because blacks are concentrated in openaccess schools that have fewer choices of majors. But this, too, is questionable. Plenty of openaccess universities offer courses and majors in STEM fields.
The implication is that black students at lowertier universities are actually less likely to graduate in STEM majors than those at higher tier ones. Which is patently false. Indeed, the historically black colleges and universities, many of which aren’t selective at all, tend to have among the highest rates of graduating STEM majors.
And if you want to get a job in a lucrative STEM field, your chances of completing your degree are much better at a lower-- graduating with a degree in that major falls dramatically.
If you want to know why there’s still a big salary difference for kids majoring in humanities and social sciences between elite and nonelite schools, it probably has something to do with the substance of the major. Since most employers have no idea what you learned in your sociology classes, they’ll just assume the kids who went to Harvard are smarter.
But they’ll know exactly what you learned in your math and science classes and so they’ll compensate you well if you did reasonably well no matter where you took them.
If liberal elites really were concerned about increasing the graduation rates and career earnings of minority students, they would realize that the Ivy League is not the answer.