It’s not news that there is a disparity in degree-attainment levels between white adults and black and Latino adults. Two new reports released on Thursday by the Education Trust go beyond the better-known national averages to highlight which states have the biggest gaps and which ones are doing better — and worse — at closing them.
Each report — one on black adults, the other on Latino adults — grades states on an A-to-F scale on both their current degree-attainment levels and on how that level has changed since 2000. Ed Trust, a nonprofit advocacy group, also rates states — as average, above average, or below average — on how they’ve closed the gap between white and black or Latino attainment since 2000.
Altogether, it’s not a report card to brag about.
“Even though we’ve given some states an A grade, there’s a significant amount of work to be done,” said Andrew Howard Nichols, senior director of higher-education research and data analytics and a co-author of both reports. Most states, he noted, have pretty low attainment rates. Less than a quarter of the states in the survey were rated above average in closing their attainment gaps since 2000 for either black or Latino adults.
For example, the report on black adults notes that six states — accounting for 14 percent of all black adults in the country — have extreme inequality in degree attainment compared with white adults. They are, in order from most unequal, Connecticut, Minnesota, Massachusetts, Wisconsin, New Jersey, and New York.
Likewise, six states with extreme gaps in attainment for Latino adults account for one in three such adults in the country. California led that group, with the most Latino adults and the largest gap. It was followed by Colorado, Nebraska, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Illinois.
Separately from the reports, Education Trust officials offered several suggestions for ways states and institutions could shrink those attainment gaps, including some that would especially help adults who are well beyond high-school age.
Among the ideas: reallocate money to institutions that serve a higher proportion of black and Latino students (some of which are known to improve students’ social mobility); make undocumented students eligible for in-state tuition and state aid (the Latino report highlights how some Latinos’ attainment has been hindered because of their immigration status); and provide loan forgiveness (as Wayne State University has just done) and free college (in the vein of Tennessee’s new Tennessee Reconnect program for adults).
The Biggest Gaps
Nationally, Education Trust found that while 47 percent of white adults ages 25 to 64 hold at least an associate degree, the proportion is just under 31 percent for black adults and just over 22 percent for Latino adults. For each group, the gaps were greatest at the bachelor’s-degree level.
In its state-by-state analyses, the organization identified 24 states where the attainment rates were lower than the national average for black adults and only 17 where the rates were higher. For Latino adults, it found 26 states where the rates were lower, and only 18 where they were higher. (In each of the reports, the analyses use U.S. Census Bureau data from 2000 and three-year average data for the 2014-to-2016 period, and excludes states where populations of Latino and black adults were below 15,000 in the 2014-16 period.)
The reports also highlight states that have made strong progress since 2000 in closing their attainments gaps. The two states that improved the most in closing the Latino-white gap were also states with large Latino populations, Florida and New York. Nebraska and Virginia led the states in closing the black-white attainment gap.
But as Nichols noted, there are lots of nuances in the data. West Virginia, for example, has small gaps in attainment based on race and ethnicity, but that’s in large part because the attainment rate for the state’s white population is also low.
And J. Oliver Schak, the reports’ other co-author and Ed Trust’s senior policy and research associate for higher education, said that attainment levels for Latino adults differ greatly depending on whether they were immigrants or were born in the United States. The latter have greater access to student aid than do immigrants, some of whom are facing fears of deportation for themselves or their family members.
The reports’ focus on race and ethnicity, rather than socioeconomic status, is deliberate. Nichols said Ed Trust hopes policy makers explicitly examine racial and ethnic disparities because, for this and other educational issues, “income alone does not explain the difference.”
Tiffany Jones, Ed Trust’s director of higher-education policy, said states that want to reduce their attainment gaps need to be willing to include racial and ethnic criteria in their college-accountability policies and funding formulas. She said colleges focusing on student-success projects and other such innovations should also ensure that those efforts reflect issues and solutions that might differ based on race and ethnicity.
Goldie Blumenstyk writes about the intersection of business and higher education. Check out www.goldieblumenstyk.com for information on her book about the higher-education crisis; follow her on Twitter @GoldieStandard; or email her at goldie@chronicle.com.
