Recent studies have uncovered the benefits of higher education, showing that college graduates continually outpace their less-educated counterparts in lifetime earnings.
But according to a new report from the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce, college education does little to eradicate widening inequalities between men and women as well as Whites and minorities.
The report, The College Payoff, is an update of a 2002 Census study, which analyzed 1998 demographic data. In the report, the authors looked at ties between occupations and race, gender and earnings.
The report found that college graduates earn 84 percent more than high school graduates, earning an average of $2.3 million over a lifetime.
But given recent demographic changes in higher education, some of the report’s other findings may come as a surprise. Though women are projected to comprise 57 percent of the undergraduate population by 2013, there’s still a 30-point gender gap between the earnings of college educated men and women.
For instance, the authors found that a woman would have to earn a Ph.D. to earn as much as a man with a bachelor’s degree.
“This is a relatively recent phenomenon,” says Dr. Stephen Rose, a research professor at Georgetown University’s Center for Education and the Workforce and co-author of the report. “Over the last 10 years, progressively more of the first-year entrants into four-year schools have been women, but they haven’t had much of an impact on the recent labor market.”
