When the late Justice Antonin Scalia suggested that students, including African American students, do better at colleges for which they were prepared, he was denounced as a racist.
Yep, calling somebody a racist is the default position when there is disagreement today, but Naomi Schaefer Riley today argues that Scalia's words may have been more important that some people want to believe–and, as usual, the people who pay the price are not posh liberals.
She cites two recent studies:
The first comes from the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce, which found that black students are less likely to pursue lucrative majors than their white peers. According to the report, “African Americans account for only 8 percent of general engineering majors, 7 percent of mathematics majors, and only 5 percent of computer engineering majors.”
But they’re overrepresented in fields that don’t have high salaries: “21 percent in health and medical administrative services, compared to only 6 percent in the higher-earning detailed major of pharmacy, pharmaceutical sciences, and administration.”
Finally, it noted, “They are also highly represented in . . . [the low-paying fields of] human services and community organization (20%) and social work (19%).”
“There’s a huge inadequacy here in counseling,” Anthony Carnevale, director of the center and the lead author of the report, told the Atlantic.
This seems pretty unlikely. Who doesn’t realize computer engineers get paid well? The real problem is that too many black students are getting a hopelessly inadequate K-12 education and by the time they get to college, their best bet is to major in a subject whose exams have no wrong answers and whose professors engage in rampant grade inflation.
Contrary to the myth, lower-tier universities have the highest rates of graduation in the lucrative STEM courses. A student who did well at one of these schools would be on a better path to career success than one who struggled and perhaps dropped out of a top-tier school:
A recent survey by the Wall Street Journal found that in “fields like science, technology, engineering and math, it largely doesn’t matter whether students go to a prestigious, expensive school or a low-priced one — expected earnings turn out the same.”
Liberal elites are thus sacrificing a lot of young people on the altar of the Ivy League education.