Most people think going to college is worth it. After all, you learn something, and you’re going to get a much better job with that degree than without it, right? Maybe wrong, if you’re not a white dude.
A study released by Georgetown University’s Center for Education and the Workforce revealed that African American students are overrepresented in majors that lead to low-paying jobs, such as social work and community organizing, and underrepresented in some of the fastest-growing and high-paying fields, such as engineering and computer science. According to the study, African American students represent only 7 percent of STEM majors. While social workers and community organizers are hugely important to making the world a better place, they’re also some of the worst jobs for making bank.
“The American higher education system is really quite segregated by race,” Anthony Carnevale, one of the authors of the report, told Marketwatch.
Carnevale told The Wall Street Journal that even if African American students pick a high-paying major, they may still end up with a lower-paying job, because so much of getting a job today can come down to using connections and knowing the right people.
Marketwatch points out as well that it also takes women and minorities longer to pay off their student debt. According to an analysis of data released in 2012 by the American Association of University Women, three years after graduating women overall had only paid off 33 percent of their student debt on average, with men having paid 44 percent overall. That’s a pretty big difference. And the gap is significantly worse for women of color: 9 percent for African American women and 3 percent for Hispanic women.
This doesn’t even account for all the pure discrimination that exists in the workplace, even the elite workplace. There’s a huge pay gap even between men and women who graduated from Ivy League schools, for example. We still have a quite a ways to go before going to college will be advantageous for everyone, no matter what.