The Disparate Wealth Paths for College Grads of Different Races/Ethnicities

William Emmons: If you look at white or Asian families with college degrees-- four-year college degrees-- the increase was almost double on the order of 90%, the median '92 versus the median 2013. And these are adjusted for inflation. So this is a real doubling of the wealth, what that wealth could buy over that time period. Compare that with white and Asian families that did not have four-year college degrees, there was actually a decline after adjusting for inflation over this period.

And this I think conforms with the narrative we all have heard that college is very important as Ray said for building wealth and income, all sorts of other outcomes. Very much consistent with what we expected to find.

But then when we look at the other two groups, things looked very different. So among Hispanic college graduates, there was a 27% decline between the '92 and the 2013 median after adjusting for inflation. And among Black college graduates, it was a 56% decline. A very, very substantial loss of wealth for the similarly situated families in those two distributions.

So that's the first sense in which this is a very surprising finding. Very different outcomes for college graduates depending on whether it's a white or Asian versus a Hispanic or Black family.

The other surprising aspect was that among whites and Asians, there's a clear stronger performance among college graduates, whereas for Black and Hispanic families, it's the reverse. Black and Hispanic college graduate families fared worse than noncollege families of the same race or ethnicity.

So in both of those census, we were very surprised and as Ray said we wanted to really dig into that and try to think what is going on.