Wednesday, April 18, 2012

Black women with a bachelor's degree outearn white women with a bachelor's degree

As the headline says:

New census figures offer dramatic evidence of education's big payback: Income for African-Americans with a four-year college degree has increased so much since the civil rights advances of the 1960s that we have almost closed our historical income gap with four-year, college-educated whites.

In 2003, the latest year for which figures are available, blacks with a bachelor's degree had a median income of $36,694, which is almost as high as the $38,667 median income of whites with a bachelor's degree.[...]

The median income of black males with a bachelor's degree was $41,916, almost 20 percent lower than the $51,138 median income of similarly educated white males. Similarly educated black women had a median income of $33,142, which was lower than black male graduates, but about 10 percent higher than the $30,082 median income figure for similarly degreed white women.

White women's income appears to be lower than that of black women partly because college-educated black women are less likely to leave their careers in order to raise children, according to Census Bureau surveys.

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