A College Degree is No Job Guarantee for Young African Americans

While it is well known that the gap between the unemployment rate of African Americans and the unemployment of the total population – 11.6% in April 2014 for African Americans, versus 6.3% for the entire population- you may be surprised to learn that the gap is even larger among recent college graduates.

A new report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research found that in 2013, the most recent full year of data available, 12.4 % of black college graduates between the ages of 22 and 27 were unemployed. For all college graduates in the same age range, the unemployment rate was 5.6%.

To be sure, the unemployment rate for African-Americans and the entire country as a whole had been trending downward, with African-American unemployment dipping from 12.4% in March to 11.6% in April, therefore the gap may have closed somewhat in the first half of the year.

Nevertheless, the study’s findings are significant because it undermines one of the often-cited reasons for the large gap in unemployment for African Americans and the rest of the country- that African Americans didn’t hold enough college degrees.

However, according to the study’s authors, the gap in unemployment among degree holders is the result of both “the disproportionate negative effect of economic downturns on young workers” and “ongoing racial discrimination in the labor market.”

“We live in a racist society,” John Schmitt, one of the authors, told Al Jazeera America. “We internalize a lot of views about the way people are that are deeply embedded in a lot of our economic and social policies. It’s extremely complicated, but the first step is that we need to acknowledge that we have a problem.”

The study also found that between 2007 (immediately before the Great Recession) and 2013, the unemployment rate for black recent college graduates nearly tripled, up 7.8 percentage points from 4.6 percent in 2007.

What’s more, of the African-Americans with college degrees, in 2013, more than half (55.9 %) were “underemployed,” meaning they were working in an occupation that typically does not require a four-year college degree. Even before the Great Recession, almost half of black recent graduates were underemployed (45.0 percent in 2007), according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

For the complete study, visit the Economic and Policy Research.