Here's an interesting follow-up to last night's post debunking Kerry's claim that there are more blacks in jail than in college (In fact, there are more than twice as many blacks in college than in jail)
Compared to their proportions in the overall population, blacks are slightly overrepresented in college, while whites are somewhat underrepresented.
Source: U.S. Census Bureau (2000)
| Total | Black | White | |||
| Population (> age 3yrs) | 270,076,176 | 32,734,511 | 12.1% | 203,756,357 | 75.4% |
| College/grad school enrollment | 17,483,262 | 2,224,181 | 12.7% | 12,502,749 | 71.2% |
Hat tip: Gene Expression.
Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at July 13, 2004 02:17 PMAh, what's the relative ages, though? If the white population lives longer or is just older, it would have a greater percentage of people not of college/grad school age. Also, the white population I think tends to have fewer kids, which skews the age distribution.
Posted by: John Thacker on July 13, 2004 04:18 PMTwice as many black girls as black boys go to college, so the one is severely over-represented the other under-.
Liberals don't want to talk about the boy/girl disparity among blacks because it leads back to welfare policy and feminist destruction of the family.
Posted by: Richard Bennett on July 13, 2004 04:36 PMThere is an error in the basic maths of this analysis, which leads to an error in the conclusion.
If there are 12,502,749 whites enrolled in tertiary institutions this is 16.29%, not 71.2%, of the 203,756,357 whites in the US.
About 12% of all blacks are enrolled in college.
Thus whites are about 30% more likely to be enrolled in college than blacks.
Given the cost of private college degrees, this disparity can be easily explained by the lower SES achieved by blacks.
Posted by: Jack Strocchi on July 13, 2004 05:12 PMJack: I think the basic errors are in your own maths.
The 12.5 million whites in college is 71.2% of the total college enrollment.
But looking at it another way, it also represents 6.14% of the 203+ million whites. (where does your 16.29% number come from?)
The 2.2 million blacks in college are about 6.79% of the total 32+ million black population.
ooops there was an error in my basic maths, forgot to convert ratios to percentage.
There are 6.1% of whites enrolled in college. This is half the ratio of blacks enrolled in college.
Posted by: Jack Strocchi on July 13, 2004 05:21 PMHey Jack, you'd better get a new calculator.
Let's work in thousands. There are 32,735 thousand blacks in the U.S. over age 3. 2,224 thousand are in college. So 2224/32735 = 6.79% of black americans over the age of three are in college.
For whites the total population over 3 is 203,756 of which 12,503 are in college (again, working in thousands). So 12503/203756 = 6.14% of white americans over age 3 are in college.
Posted by: John Smith on July 14, 2004 02:08 AMThe figures are correct.
Of a total college enrollment of 17,483,262, the black enrollment is 2,224,181 (12.7% of the total) and the white enrollment is 12,502,749 (71.2% of the total.
As blacks comprise only 12.1 % of the total population, and their college enrollment is 12.7% of the total college enrollment they are over represented by .6%.
Posted by: Rocco C on July 14, 2004 04:23 AMNot necessarily a statistically significant overrepresentation (considering the various factors which might be in play), but it does refute the idea that black people are underrepresented in college.
Posted by: maor on July 14, 2004 04:42 AMThe percentage may be skewed simply by the fact that a higher percentage of black people are in the college age group. The correct math would be to analyze the percentage of college age people who are in college.
Posted by: Scoop on July 14, 2004 11:14 AMAs I thought, the data is quite different when looked at for current 20-21 year olds only.
Black: 49.9% in high school or high school grads not enrolled in college, 33% in college, 17.1% high school drop outs.
White: 43.9% in high school or high school grads not enrolled in college, 43.3% in college, 12.8% high school drop outs.
Asian: 31.9% in high school or high school grads not enrolled in college, 64.3% in college, only 3.8% high school drop outs.
Black people in college are a higher percentage of the black population than white people in college are of the white population only because the black population skews younger in general. When people of comparable ages are compared, more white people are in college.
FYI, the data are here:
http://www.census.gov/population/socdemo/school/ppl-148/tab01.txt
Posted by: Scoop on July 14, 2004 11:56 AMShark, others -
my resolution of this apparent counterintuitive situation is here. Short answer is that John Thacker is correct: the right denominator is the school age population, as you can see from the time series.
Posted by: gc on July 14, 2004 12:23 PMIn the 16-44 age range, percent college enrollment for Blacks exceeds White non-Hispanics by 12.8% to 12.6%.
Whites exceed blacks in the 16-21 brackets, whereas Blacks exceed whites in the 22-44 brackets.
I have no explanation. Perhaps Black enrollment is declining, or maybe Blacks are enrolling at a later age.
Black
Age Pop'n Enrollment %Enrolled
16-17 1210 19 1.6%
18-19 1251 454 36.3%
20-21 1138 375 33.0%
22-24 1624 387 23.8%
25-29 2470 325 13.2%
30-34 2621 242 9.2%
35-44 5680 244 4.3%
Total 15994 2046 12.8%
White non-Hispanic
Age Pop'n Enrollment %Enrolled
16-17 5247 87 1.7%
18-19 5221 2580 49.4%
20-21 4852 2330 48.0%
22-24 7254 1796 24.8%
25-29 11563 1275 11.0%
30-34 12934 770 6.0%
35-44 31770 1058 3.3%
Total 78841 9896 12.6%
Source:
http://www.census.gov/population/socdemo/school/ppl-148/tab01.txt