Black college graduates need more job applications and receive lower starting salaries than whites

Evidence

We’ve seen, already, that black graduates of the most elite colleges (places like Harvard, Stanford, and Duke) had to send out an average of eight applications to receive an interview, while white graduates had to send out six. The same study showed that as the institutions grew less selective, the discrepancy increased: When the study looked at public colleges (including the University of Massachusetts Amherst; the University of California, Riverside; and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro), white graduates sent out nine applications before getting an interview, and black graduates sent out fifteen. (Connecting the dots between selectivity and tuition rates, that means white students can afford to attend a cheaper, less selective college and receive about the same opportunities as a black student who goes to a more expensive, highly selective college.) And when black applicants received responses from employers, they weren’t asked to interview for the jobs they applied for; instead, they were steered toward jobs with lower starting salaries by an average of 3,000. The black-white income gap is the lowest right after graduation, so we should expect that 3,000 differential to grow over time due to racial differences in salary increases and bonuses. — Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth, 378

Categorization

• CANDY: The eight-versus-six and fifteen-versus-nine application numbers are clean, quotable stats for a dinner-table or elevator argument about hiring bias.