WASHINGTON — Though Black college graduates generally fare better than Black high school graduates, higher education has not proven sufficient to remedy America’s racial wage gap, a leading labor economist said recently during a Black History Month lecture.
“One of the big policy prescriptions is, ‘All we need to do to address the Black-White wage gap or minority wage gap or gender pay gaps — to a lesser extent — is to what? Improve education,’” said Dr. William M. Rodgers III, a professor of public policy and chief economist at the Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University, mildly mocking the notion that higher education will help end wage disparities.
To bolster his point, Rodgers showed a graph that illustrated how, in the late 1970s and 1980s, Black and White college graduates “were basically at parity.”
More specifically, among college graduates, the Black-White wage gap stood at 4 percent in 1980 among those who had a bachelor’s degree or more, and 8.8 percent among those who had only a bachelor’s. Those gaps widened over time and stood at 17.8 and 18 percent in 2015, figures from the EPI show.
“You see a dramatic growth in the wage gap over time in the 1980s and into the 1990s,” Rodgers said. “So this notion that we can solve the problem just by having African-Americans get their B.A.s, it helps to address some of the wage gap but it’s not the panacea. It’s not the silver bullet.”
Rodgers made his remarks recently to a group of students at the Johns Hopkins University SAIS International Economics Department during a presentation titled “Race, Education, and the Labor Market: Where Do We Go From Here?”
