Washington Monthly - September/October 2020 - 48

COLLEGES WHERE
MAJORS POPULAR
WITH BLACK STUDENTS
PAY WELL
The good news: There are some. The bad news: There aren't many.
By the Editors

n the United States, there's a direct correlation between
the average earnings of a college major and what percentage of the major's students are Black. In the highest-paying
disciplines-subjects such as computer science, chemical engineering, and finance-Black students are a significantly smaller share of recent graduates than they are nationwide (in the
case of those three, the share is below 5 percent, compared to
a national share of roughly 10 percent). For the lowest-paying
majors, the opposite is true. The subject with the highest share
of Black graduates-health and medical administration-leads
to first-year average incomes that are tens of thousands of dollars less than finance, and roughly half of what computer science and chemical engineering students go on to earn.
There are many reasons for this correlation, ranging from
high school segregation to the relative emphasis these subjects place on bringing about positive social change (see Daniel Block, "Why STEM Needs Social Justice," page 26). It has
spurred intense efforts by both policymakers and many universities to graduate more people of color from high-paying fields.
These endeavors are important for the financial wellbeing of these communities and for the social well-being of the
United States. But it's also important that institutions respect
the choices Black students make for themselves, and highpaying fields are far from the only ones worth studying. Indeed, the fields that Black students disproportionately graduate from are essential to both day-to-day life and academic inquiry. Without social workers, the U.S. safety net system would
collapse. Sociology leads to a plethora of worthy careers, from
political advocacy to urban planning to sociological research itself. This means it's critical that we work not just to graduate
more Black students from STEM majors. It means we need to
figure out how to make sure the subjects more Black people already study lead to better-paying jobs.
48 September/October 2020

To that end, the Washington Monthly has gathered newly
available data from the Department of Education to examine
at which specific colleges the majors (or "programs") known for
high Black enrollment, like social work, lead to above-average
earnings. We started by looking at the 38 most popular majors
in America and identifying the four with the largest share of recent Black graduates: health and medical administration (26.1
percent of recent graduates); social work (22 percent); criminal justice (20 percent); and sociology (18.6 percent). Next, to
make sure we were working with a large enough sample size,
we eliminated every school whose program graduated fewer
than 50 students in the past two years and then, among these
schools, calculated the median first-year earnings for each of
the four programs. Then, we cut out all institutions where the
first-time, full-time undergraduate Black graduation rate is below 50 percent (the graduation rate for these Black students
nationwide is 40 percent) to eliminate institutions that saddle most of their Black students with debt without providing
any credentials. To ensure that the graduation rate came from
a large enough sample size to be meaningful, we took out every school that graduated fewer than 25 first-time, full-time
Black students.
After that, we isolated the colleges where program graduates had above-average earnings relative to program graduates
nationwide and where the program graduated an aboveaverage share of Black students relative to its peers nationwide. The result, displayed on page 50, is a list of the schools
where the majors in which Black students are most represented lead to well-paying jobs, and where we feel as confident as
we can that they are sharing in the returns.
The outcome is somewhat depressing: There are not many
programs that meet these thresholds. You may notice, for example, that there's no health and medical administration list.

Washington Monthly - September/October 2020

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