How College Is Widening the Wealth Gap for Black Americans

College Was Supposed to Close the Wealth Gap for Black Americans. The Opposite Happened. This headline from The Wall Street Journal is not unlike another WSJ article I recently shared about law degrees becoming less and less profitable. For Black millennials, higher education has become a quicksand pit.

College, once a gateway to class mobility and financial success for Black Americans, is now dragging Black graduates further away from dreams such as homeownership and wealth accumulation, dreams that their parents' generation could achieve more easily, and that their white peers have always had more access to.

The wealth gap between white and Black Americans has existed since the era of slavery. The accumulation of generational wealth that white families knew was not possible for Black families. Racist lending policies and professional prejudice denied Black families financial opportunities for decades. Black communities were hit disproportionately hard by the 2008 financial crisis. And now, higher education, the thing that should've been a route toward building wealth, is the very thing setting young Black folks back at rates older generations did not experience.

Let's look at some numbers from The Wall Street Journal: "More than 84% of college-educated Black households in their 30s have student debt, up from 35% three decades ago, when many baby boomers were at the same age. The younger generation owes a median of $44,000, up from less than $6,000. By comparison, 53% of white college-educated households in their 30s have debt, up from 27% three decades earlier. The median amount rose to $35,000 from $8,000. All figures are adjusted for inflation."

The snowball effect is not hard to envision. Black families starting out with less historical wealth are worse-equipped to help fund their children's education, and thus leave their children with more student debt. As their white college-educated peers have watched their net worth grow by 17%, from around $120,000 to $138,000 over the past 30 years, the net worth of Black college-educated households has fallen almost 84%, from $50,400 in the 1990s to only $8,200 today.

Ristina Gooden, the daughter of two college graduates and a graduate of Ohio State University, started graduate school at Vanderbilt University in 2019. Her expected student loans after graduation? $100,000. Of this, she says, "It feels like a burden I will carry for the rest of my life."

But there are still many stories of young Black professionals who cherish the career freedom and fulfillment that a college degree has brought them. Some have been able to purchase their first home; some have been able to pursue jobs they love, jobs that their parents couldn't. However, the general trend of this generation is that the rising cost of higher education has not only widened the wealth gap, but it has done so by a greater amount.

If this country is truly interested in closing the wealth gap between white and Black Americans, then we should be starting with the insurmountable costs of going to college. Grants, loans, and scholarships are simply not enough; it all starts with tuition. When going to college costs more than it's worth, we need to critically re-evaluate the institution of higher education in America.