November 7, 2008
Study Finds Blacks Reap Smaller Financial Gains From Certain Majors
Jacksonville, Fla. — Black students who major in high-paying fields appear to reap smaller financial gains when they enter the job market than do comparable Asian- and Hispanic-American students, according to a new study of minority scholarship applicants.
The study, scheduled to be discussed here tomorrow at the annual conference of the Association for the Study of Higher Education, tracked about 350 students who had applied for the Gates Millennium Scholars Program for low-income minority students and had gone through its selection process. The students, who graduated from high school in the spring of 2000 and entered college the following academic year, were surveyed by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago at various intervals until six years after their graduation from high school.
Because the Gates program looks well beyond the SAT scores of scholarship applicants, and examines a host of psychological traits related to college persistence and early earnings, focusing on that population helped the researchers ensure comparability among the students being studied.
Even when comparable students majored in the same fields, the economic benefits they reaped from college upon entering the job market varied substantially by race and ethnicity, according to a paper on the study’s findings by Tatiana Melguizo, an assistant professor of higher education at the University of Southern California, and Gregory C. Wolniak, a research scientist at the National Opinion Research Center.
The salary premium that Asian- and Hispanic-American students received from majoring in science, technology, mathematics, or engineering was 50 percent higher than what black students who had majored in those fields were earning soon after college, the study found. Asian- and Hispanic-American students also reaped a higher salary premium than did black students for majoring in professional fields such as business or law.
The researchers say they did not look into whether discrimination explained the gaps they found because they did not have sufficient data matching students with their employers. They found some evidence that variations in occupational choices may play a role, but said more research was needed there as well.
Their paper concludes that, “in a scholarship program or campus-based policies aimed at promoting economic outcomes, attention needs to be placed on how and why students choose their field of study, as well as the manner in which their education influences their occupational attainment.” —Peter Schmidt
http://chronicle.com/news/article/5456/study-finds-blacks-reap-smaller-financial-gains-from-certain-majors
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