A White-Minority Riddle: Similar Educations, Different Wages

Opponents of affirmative action claim that the discrimination remedy is no longer needed because overt discrimination has mostly been eliminated. Minority workers earn less than whites, goes the argument, mainly because they are less adequately prepared, not because they are victims of discrimination. Rather than maintaining a system of preferences to help these less qualified minority workers, the focus should be on improving their qualifications--for example, by improving schools to narrow test-score gaps between minority and white students.

This argument is plausible; it’s well known that minorities’ wages are lower than whites’ wages, while minority attainment (years of school completed) and achievement (test scores) in education also lag behind whites’. But do these gaps in education fully explain average wage differences, or are minorities’ wages even lower than they “should” be, given relatively poorer qualifications?

Putting aside the question of what is an “appropriate” average wage for a given education, it is reasonable to assume that as minority-white education gaps narrow over time, wage gaps between the two should similarly close as better-educated minority youths enter the work force as young adults. Unfortunately, California’s education and wage trends have moved in opposite directions.

In 1980, 90% of California’s young (aged 25 to 34) male black workers had graduated from high school, compared to 94% of young male white workers. By 1995, 95% of young black workers were high-school graduates, while the number for their white counterparts was 96%.

In 1980, 57% of young black workers had completed “some” college, including community colleges or technical institutes. This rose to 63% by 1995. The share of young white male workers who had attended “some” college rose from 68% to 70% during these years, so the gap between black and white males with “some college” narrowed.

The college-graduation disparity also shrank. In 1980, 18% of young male black workers were graduates, but 20% in 1995. For comparable whites, college completion went from 34% to 35%.

Black females, Latino males and females, on the whole, also narrowed attainment gaps in education vis-a-vis whites.

This would not necessarily translate into improved worker qualifications if school standards declined, making it easier for lower-achieving minority youths to graduate from high school or college. But test-score data show that achievement gaps between minorities and whites also narrowed. Young minority workers have improved their academic achievement faster than whites, while minority attainment was also growing relative to whites’.

The College Board first collected data on race and ethnicity of SAT test-takers in 1976. That year, California’s black students who took the SAT had an average score of 684 (verbal and math, combined); Mexican Americans’ average was 773. By 1987, blacks’ average score had climbed to 747, and Mexican Americans’ to 793. These gains were both real and relative: Whites’ scores remained mostly unchanged. The rises in the minorities’ SAT scores are especially significant because a larger share of minority 17-year-olds took the test in 1987 than in 1976. Usually, the greater number of test-takers would put downward pressure on the average score.

It’s thus reasonable to assume that increases in the proportion of California’s young minority workers who either graduated from college or had some college experience represent a real improvement in these workers’ qualifications. Greater average academic achievement accompanied more years of schooling.

But this dramatic narrowing of education gaps did not produce a narrowing of wage gaps when these youths became employed. Wages of young (25 to 34 years old) black male workers were, on average, 84% of white wages in 1980; 15 years later, blacks earned only 77% of white wages. For Latinas, average wages fell from 83% of white female wages in 1980, to 71% in 1995. Similar trends characterize the relative wages of black females and Latino males.

Relative wages also fell for minority workers, compared with those for whites with comparable education. Young black male workers with college degrees earned 94% of their white counterparts’ earnings in 1980; by 1990, it had fallen to 86%. For Latina workers with college degrees, earnings were 95% of comparable white females’ in 1980, but only 90% in 1990. Similar trends are evident when earnings of minority and white workers with high school diplomas only, or those who attended “some college,” are compared.

The existence of such wage-education disparities doesn’t prove that affirmative action is the most appropriate response. Some analysts, for example, believe that declining minority wages, despite these workers’ improved qualifications, result from geography. Because fewer good jobs exist in minority communities, there may be more qualified workers relative to the number of job openings in these communities than where whites reside. This labor oversupply would tend to drive down wages.

But, for whatever reasons, labor markets are not rewarding minority and white workers equally even though they may have similar qualifications.