For many low-income students, a college education ISN’T paying off.

• Low-income college graduates earn 50 cents to every dollar earned by middle-income graduates over their lifetime.

• Over 25% of BA and AA degrees have a negative return on investment (ROI) (i.e., graduates earn less than high school graduates over their lifetimes). Many other degrees have marginal returns.

• Black and Brown students are disproportionately enrolled in degrees with a lower ROI.

Data sources: Bartik, T. J., & Hershbein, B. (2016). "Degrees of Poverty: Family Income Background and the College Earnings Premium." Employment Research 23(3): 1-3; and FreeOpp.org.

Educational investments that don’t pay off widen the racial wealth gap.

  • Twenty years after starting college, half of Black borrowers still owed 95% of their student loans, white borrowers just 6%.

  • The racial wealth gap among young families with college degrees is growing. The median wealth of young Black families declined from $54,000 in 1995 to a mere $8,000 in 2019. During that same period the wealth of white families grew to $138,000. 

Without clearly marked paths to well-paying careers, belief in the value of postsecondary education is eroding.

  • Only 45% of low-income, BIPOC, and first-gen college students surveyed in 2022 believe that education beyond high school is necessary, down from 58% before the pandemic.

  • Counselors lack the information they need to counter this belief and help students find a high-value postsecondary option aligned with their interests. There is a particularly glaring gap in information about the myriad of sub-baccalaureate technical training and apprenticeship programs offered by community colleges, unions, and other vocational training providers. Navigating this maze of options can be a daunting task for any high school counselor.

PIC analysis of NCS records

That has led to an alarming decline in college enrollment among Black and Brown students.

In Boston, the percentage of Black public high school graduates enrolling in a 2- or 4-year college declined from 68% in 2016 to 50% in 2021. For Latinx students, the rate of college enrollment in 2021 was 43%, down 19 percentage points from 2016.  In contrast, white student college enrollment only declined 5 points – from 77% in 2016 to 72% in 2021.  The story is similar for several other low-income communities.