College Demographics

The Federal government studies everything. One of the things that are studied is enrollment rates of colleges by various demographics. The demographic that this post will focus on is part of my continuing discussion on race that various people say that they want to have: college enrollment rates of 18-24 year olds by race.

According to the government, 41 percent of all people aged 18-24 were enrolled in college in 2010, with enrollment in 4 year colleges being about double of 2 year colleges. This is to be expected, since it takes twice as long to complete, there should be double the enrollment.

38 percent of black Americans age 18-24 are enrolled, compared to 43 percent of whites. Pretty close, especially when you understand that Asians, with an 82% enrollment rate, are counted as white for statistical purposes in this report.

Which brings us to the next fact. The gap between white and black college enrollment disappears when you eliminate high school dropouts: 46% of black versus 48% of white high school graduates are enrolled in college.

What we see as the problem here is that large numbers of blacks are dropping out of high school. In fact, 124,000 blacks dropped out of high school during the 2011-2012 school year.

graduates per dropout by race:
White: 12.29

Asian:  9.15
Hispanic: 5.20
Black 3.79

There is a problem here. For every black that enters college, there is one that dropped out of high school. I hear many people complain that blacks have lower credit ratings, incomes, and higher rates of incarceration than other races. Perhaps the best way to fix this is to fix what appears to be a broken culture of fatherless children, high school dropouts, the gang lifestyle, all of which contributes to multiple generations of government dependency. This will likely be more difficult than blaming racism, but will undoubtedly be more successful.