Why blacks value education more than whites

Consider the following statements:

Emily: "I am wary of sounding smart."

Ted's teacher: "I don't think Ted has any really close friends. Sometimes this school can be really a little less than kind . . . because he's that intelligent."

Amy's mother: "In New York, where we come from, Amy is considered . . . a geek . . . because she uses words that [other students] don't understand."

Unnamed male: "I don't think it really helped me in my love life. . . . I think that having won something like [the national spelling bee] could be regarded as being a significant liability."

The quotes above, actually, are all by or about white students. They are from the documentary Spellbound about national spelling bee competitions. Armed with these quotes, would I be taken seriously if I claimed that white students do not value education? Of course, not. But if, with similar quotes from black students, I claimed that black students do not value education, I would be praised for telling "hard truths"--although my assertions would be completely false.

Contrary to the popular media reports, for anyone who bothers to look at the data, it is clear that blacks value education more than whites. This issue came to mind again while reading a new report [PDF] from the Pew Research Center. The researchers found that "Blacks (83%) and Hispanics (85%) also are more likely than whites (69%) to say a college degree is a necessity" (p. 19) to get ahead in life.

Just like the Pew survey, every other survey that I've ever seen--and it's basically my job to look at surveys--shows that blacks, including black students, express stronger pro-education attitudes than whites. In a previous Daily Voice piece I discussed three other surveys which showed that blacks value education more than whites.

In that piece, I did not discuss what the college completion research reveals about black students. In the Black-White Test-Score Gap, Christopher Jencks and Meredith Phillips find that "when we compare blacks and whites with the same twelfth grade test scores, blacks are more likely than whites to complete college." They add in a footnote, "Similar results can be found in samples dating back to the early 1960s, so they are not attributable to affirmative action." Whites with similar academic abilities as blacks obtain less education than blacks do.

Jencks and Phillips note that socioeconomic disadvantage from birth onward are factors in the, on average, lower educational attainment and achievement of blacks. When Patrick Mason (in a 2007 Industrial Relations article) statistically compares blacks and whites of equivalent class backgrounds, he finds that black women obtain 3 percent more years of education than white men and black men obtain 6 percent more. All of this research--the many surveys and the statistical analyses--shows that blacks value education more than whites.

Because journalists and the pundits have not been looking at the data, no one has asked why do blacks value education more than whites. My hypothesis is that it is simply economically rational for blacks to feel this way about education. Blacks need education more than whites to succeed. For example, in the third quarter of this year, blacks with bachelor's or higher degrees had an unemployment rate of 8.5 percent. This rate was almost twice the comparable rate for college-educated whites. Further, the unemployment rate for college-educated blacks was nearly the same as the rate for whites with only a high school diploma (8.9 percent). To have equivalent odds of finding a job as a particular white person, a black person needs to be better educated than that white person.

In 2008, the median income for a black man with a bachelor's degree who worked full-time all year was $51,570. The median income for a white man with a high school diploma was $52,193, slightly higher. To have similar earnings as a white person, more often than not, a black person needs to be better educated than that white person.

To have equal economic success as a given white person, blacks need to be better educated than that white person. A high school diploma obtained by a white person leads to as much economic success as a bachelor's degree obtained by many blacks. So, I suspect that blacks value education more than whites because economic success is more dependent on a high level of education for blacks than it is for whites.