Black, Hispanic College Grads See Incomes Fall Over 2 Decades While Whites, Asians Continue to Soar
Black and Hispanic college educated graduates have seen their wealth and income steadily decrease over the last two decades.
In fact, the fall has been precipitous. Not only are they doing much worse than their white and Asian counterparts, but they lag behind even black and Hispanics who lack four-year college degrees.
Conducted by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, CNN reports the study concluded the median income for blacks and Hispanics who finished college over a 20-year period beginning in 1992 consistently declined, while, in terms of percentages, whites and Asians saw double-digit average increases over that same period.
According to St. Louis Fed economist William Emmons, fueling all the disparity are ongoing pockets of racism, which result in blacks and Hispanics being much less likely to be hired in well to do posts from the start. In addition, higher paying fields and industries such as technology are typically dominated by white and Asian graduates.
Somewhat stunningly, blacks and Hispanics with lesser levels of education have seen their incomes comparatively surge by 17.3 percent and 15.6 percent respectively, a stark contrast to the grim reality many degree holders from those very same sectors have come to view.
As for the obtuse variable of median wealth, which is tabulated to include assets like the value of one's home and savings, more educated blacks and Hispanics have suffered significant losses over the last 20 years than whites and Asians.
The study found that part of the reason for those discrepancies are the huge amounts of debt college-educated blacks and Hispanics on average carried prior to the Great Recession, resulting in them being hit even harder by the hardships like the housing market crash.
Over that time frame, the average value of homes owned by educated blacks and Hispanics fell by a cumulative average of 48 percent, compared to 25 percent and 6 percent for whites and Asians respectively.
In a separate report, Demos also recently found that blacks are typically forced to borrow much more in order to earn their degrees and thus are much more likely to be in debt than whites and Asians once they have completed the curriculum. Hispanics, meanwhile, tend to take on more debt to graduate from private, nonprofit colleges.
Overall, the average net worth of black college graduates was $32,800 compared to just $9,000 for those without degrees. For Hispanics the gap was even wider, with grads on average pocketing a median of $49,600, while those less educated were forced to survive on an annual average of just $12,150.
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