Read, if you're ready to have your blood boil.
White flight is creating a separate and unequal system of higher education
In the post-World War II era, whites fled the center city to the leafy-green suburbs and better neighborhood schools. Today, a similar trend has taken root in American higher education, only this time whites are fleeing the underfunded and overcrowded two-year and four-year open-access colleges for the nation’s top 500 universities...
At the top 500 universities, whites comprise 70 percent of students, compared to their 57 percent share of the college-age population. Meanwhile, as blacks and Latinos have swarmed the halls of open-access colleges, whites have fled them. White students have declined from 68 percent to 49 percent of students at open-access colleges, while black and Latino students have grown from 26 percent to 45 percent.
It should come as no surprise that the outcomes at the top 500 universities and the 3,000 open-access colleges are vastly different: 82 percent of students at top universities graduate, compared to 49 percent of students at open-access colleges. Unequal college outcomes then lead to unequal career success and differential access to graduate school, which is especially important because it is only at the graduate degree level that we see race-based earnings gaps converge.
Our racially stratified postsecondary education system serves as a passive agent that mimics and magnifies the race-based inequities it inherits from the K-12 education system and projects them into the labor market. Whites educated at elite colleges go on to have successful careers, marry other whites with similar backgrounds, and buy homes in the right neighborhoods. Those neighborhoods in turn give their kids access to a top education in pre-K through high school that prepares them for selective colleges, beginning anew the self-sustaining intergenerational cycle of racial privilege.
White flight is creating a separate and unequal system of higher education
In the post-World War II era, whites fled the center city to the leafy-green suburbs and better neighborhood schools. Today, a similar trend has taken root in American higher education, only this time whites are fleeing the underfunded and overcrowded two-year and four-year open-access colleges for the nation’s top 500 universities...
At the top 500 universities, whites comprise 70 percent of students, compared to their 57 percent share of the college-age population. Meanwhile, as blacks and Latinos have swarmed the halls of open-access colleges, whites have fled them. White students have declined from 68 percent to 49 percent of students at open-access colleges, while black and Latino students have grown from 26 percent to 45 percent.
It should come as no surprise that the outcomes at the top 500 universities and the 3,000 open-access colleges are vastly different: 82 percent of students at top universities graduate, compared to 49 percent of students at open-access colleges. Unequal college outcomes then lead to unequal career success and differential access to graduate school, which is especially important because it is only at the graduate degree level that we see race-based earnings gaps converge.
Our racially stratified postsecondary education system serves as a passive agent that mimics and magnifies the race-based inequities it inherits from the K-12 education system and projects them into the labor market. Whites educated at elite colleges go on to have successful careers, marry other whites with similar backgrounds, and buy homes in the right neighborhoods. Those neighborhoods in turn give their kids access to a top education in pre-K through high school that prepares them for selective colleges, beginning anew the self-sustaining intergenerational cycle of racial privilege.
