[NOTE: This post has been UPDATED]
Five days ago the New York Times published a front page article on the job hunt travails of black college graduates, an article I criticized here. Now, here they go again: today’s ‘Whitening’ the Résumé adds little or nothing to what was published last week.
Well, there was this: Michael Luo, the New York Times reporter, finds it “startling” that black job seekers, fearing discrimination, often attempt to disguise their race.
That seemed startling somehow, maybe because of the popular perception that affirmative action still confers significant advantages to black job candidates, a perception that is not borne out in studies. Moreover, statistics show even college-educated blacks suffering disproportionately in this jobless environment compared with whites, as that [earlier] article reported.
What studies? And is there evidence that the black applicants who are “suffering disproportionately” are in fact proportionately qualified?
On what may be a related point, last week the National Science Foundation published an initial report from its Survey of Earned Doctorates, and the demographic data there may well have some bearing on job prospects, and not just of those with doctorates. A breakdown of that demographic data can be found here.
30,791 doctorates in all fields were awarded to U.S. citizens or permanent residents in 2008, and 2030 of them went to blacks. But of those black doctorates, 758, or over 37%, were in education. 241, or a little under 12%, were in physical sciences or engineering. By contrast, 24% of all the doctorates earned by whites and Asians were in physical sciences or engineering.
If we assume that the demographic distribution of undergraduate majors is not significantly different from the distribution of doctorates, it is certainly possible that black college graduates have a “disproportionately” harder time finding jobs because they “disproportionately” earned degrees that carry less weight in the job market.
UPDATE [7 December]
Keeping in mind that I don’t do numbers very well and am certainly not an education researcher, let’s play with these numbers a bit.
First, more numbers: According to this U.S. Census Bureau, 2005 American Community Survey Public Use Microdata Sample File, in 2005 there were 25,346,474 whites and 2,312,003 blacks 25 years old or older with bachelors degrees.
Now, if we make the reasonable (I think) assumption mentioned above — that the distribution of those degrees would at least roughly resemble the distribution of doctorates, that would mean that in 2005 there were 6,083,154 whites but only 227,440 blacks in the United States with degrees in engineering or some physical science. Thus for every 100 science or engineering job seekers, over 96% of them would be white. (This analysis would have been more accurate if I had included Asians, but doing so would have put an additional strain on my arithmetic and would have put blacks at an additional disadvantage since a higher percentage of Asians have science and engineering degrees than whites.)
Even if we assume that grades and other measures of educational qualification (such as nature of institution attended) were randomly distributed between the two racial groups, there is no reason to assume that employers who found the most qualified applicants from among the 96% rather than the 4% were guilty of racial discrimination, either conscious or unconscious.
I realize of course that not all job applicants are in science or engineering fields, but I mean this little exercise to be suggestive, not dispositive, of the prevalence of racial discrimination in the job market.
While I’m at it, here’s another bit of evidence suggesting that fears of rampant discrimination may be considerably exaggerated:
A white woman with a bachelor’s degree typically earned nearly $37,800 in 2003, compared with $41,100 for a college-educated black woman and nearly $43,700 for a college-educated Asian woman, according to data being released today by the Census Bureau. Hispanic women took home slightly less, at $37,600 a year.
Insofar as racism explains the employment problems of black college graduates, many employers must somehow not be noticing that black women are black.
Now listen (if you like the sound of fingernails on blackboards) to Rep. Maxine Waters:
We don’t like to talk about it, but there’s still discrimination in our society. Black college graduates can’t get professional jobs as easily as whites. We have blacks disguising their voices on the telephone or trying to hide their blackness in responding to job announcements. It’s real.
Really? I must have trouble hearing the sound of silence, since I’ve not noticed any reluctance on the part of Rep. Waters, the New York Times, et. al. to talk about the persistence and prevalence of rampant racism. And talk, and talk….
