Inside Higher Ed reports this morning on what the College Board Advocacy & Policy Center’s press release in its first sentence calls its new reports that “… Reveal Alarming Facts About the Educational Experiences of Young Men of Color”:
NEW YORK, June 20, 2011 /PRNewswire/ — Nearly half of young men of color age 15 to 24 who graduate from high school will end up unemployed, incarcerated or dead.
In one respect the statistics are even more “jarring,” for as Keynes pointed out long ago all of us, not just young men of color, will end up dead. Still, if you look at Figure 31 (p. 49) of one of the College Board reports I think you will conclude that introducing death as one of three possible outcomes was a bit hyperbolic. Yes, 0.3% of black males were dead by 24, compared to only 0.2% of both white and Hispanic males, but in my opinion that’s not the most dramatic finding shown in Figure 31.
Far more dramatic, I think, is the fact that an astounding 69.3 of Asian female high school graduates are engaged in higher education (and 0.0% were dead), compared to 47% of white males and 52.6% of white females.
Also noteworthy is the fact that males in every racial and ethnic group were far, dramatically more likely to be incarcerated than females. Indeed, by the logic of “disparate impact,” which assumes that “underrepresentation” is always the result of discrimination (and, in the alternative, always needs to be remedied even when it’s not), the criminal justice system is guilty of systematic (read “systemic”) discrimination, although whether against men or women is not clear.
“Alarming”?
Is that like “unexpectedly” with clearer recognition of “unintended consequences”?