Educational attainment among Blacks is often reported in relation to whites, but this can obscure how other factors influence educational and economic outcomes for Blacks in relation to each other. To this end, my objective is to examine and compare levels of formal education among Black people in large, majority-Black (>50%) cities.
I examine the percentage of Black residents with 4-year, graduate and professional degrees in majority-Black cities with populations of 100,000 or more. According to the most recent ACS Demographic and Housing Estimates, there are 21 cities in the United States that fit my criteria for analysis. The majority-Black city with the highest percentage of Black residents with at least a bachelor’s degree is Washington, DC, while the city with the lowest percentage of such residents is Cleveland, Ohio.
In order to ascertain what may differentiate cities with more highly educated Black residents from cities with fewer highly educated Black residents, I consider four additional factors: median household income, per-capita income, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) usage, and high school graduation rate. The first three roughly relate to income level, while the latter speaks directly to lower levels of robustness in the educational system. I use R to run linear regression analyses for each of these variables separately, and a multiple regression analysis for these variables in conjunction with one another.
• Among the cities examined, income serves as a key differentiating factor. Specifically, cities where a higher percentage of Black residents possess at least a bachelor’s degree tend to have higher per capita and median household incomes. The correlation may reflect that college graduates typically earn more money. The direction of causality is unclear (and may be circular) – highly educated parents with more money to spend on their children may be better able to invest in those children’s education. More granular, temporal data would be useful for future inquiry in this regard.
• High school graduation rates also correlate significantly with higher levels of post-secondary educational attainment. This is not surprising, since one generally must graduate from high school before embarking on a university degree. However, the correlation between the two suggests that part of the problem may need to be tackled at the K-12 level. I do not account for geographic mobility during the K-12 years, which is something that would be useful for additional analysis.
• I run a multiple regression analysis, with the percentage of Black residents who possess a bachelor’s degree or higher as my dependent variable, and high school graduation rate, per capita income, median household income, and SNAP usage rate as my independent variables. The results indicate that 66.65% (or, adjusted based on the number of samples, 58.31%) of the variation in the cities’ percentage of college-educated Black residents can be explained in terms of those four independent variables. The low p-value indicates that these results are statistically significant.
• Other spatial variables that may be worth looking into include zoning practices, pollutants, housing prices, and/or foreclosure rates. These would be especially amenable to spatial econometric analyses, such as fixed-effect spatial lag models. I was unfortunately unable to gather sufficient data on these variables in the time allotted, but I strongly suspect that they would be illuminating.
• How much of the highly skilled workforce is imported vs. home-grown? Are the cities with the highest educational attainment rates attracting Black college graduates from other places? Importing a strong workforce will provide a helpful initial boost, but a sustainable long-term strategy must include local students and institutions – long-term infrastructure for success.
My findings indicate that the combination of various measures of income and high school graduation are strong predictors of the possession of bachelor’s degrees among Black residents in large Black-majority cities. The strong explanatory power of these variables suggest that policies which increase economic opportunity will correlate with increases in the number of bachelor’s degree holders in these places. However, the presence of high-paying jobs that reward higher education is not enough; it must correspond with investment in the local workforce, including improvements in K-12 and other programs that encourage community achievement. It is also important for these types of programs to retain links to local stakeholders, so that the residents who make these cities thrive can in turn reap the benefits of their successes. That is, success should not mean gentrification that displaces residents.