Desperately Searching for Higher Education among the Ruins of the Great Society Volume II

Volume II of Desperately Searching for Higher Education Among the Ruins of the Great Society documents Black college students’ enrollment and graduation from post-secondary institutions at the undergraduate and graduate levels in the U.S. Volume II also documents Black students’ poverty, their under-preparation and achievement in high school, their high rates of borrowing to finance their post-secondary education which has resulted in high student loan burdens, high college drop-out rates and high student loan default rates at U.S. colleges and universities. But the overarching the theme that cuts across Black students’ performance at all levels of schooling in the U.S. is their poverty and how tightly poverty is correlated with academic achievement from elementary school through college and graduate school. The disintegration of the Black family, i.e., just 35-37% of Black children are raised in two-parent families while 65-70% of Black children are raised in single-parent families primarily in poverty. Suffice it to say that high poverty rates in Black families are a significant factor in Black students’ under-achievement on standardized achievement tests at the elementary and secondary level as well as their low rates of enrollment and graduation from post-secondary institutions. In 2019, the median income of most Black households with children in America was just $40,000 per year as opposed to $70,000 for White households in the U.S. For most Black children, poverty characterizes and strongly correlates with their progress through school as significantly as their low standardized test scores and their low graduation rates from college especially in STEM fields. Read more