African American Males Want Long-Term Relationships

Results from a new survey have caused a few “say what’s?”  The poll, by NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard School of Public Health, finds that single black men are much more likely to say they’re looking for a long-term relationship (43 percent) than single black women (25 percent).

Overall, as the study notes, “When people in the prime marrying cohort — ages 18 to 49, never married, divorced or widowed — were asked whether they were seeking a long-term relationship, just about a third said they were.” But men were significantly more likely to say so than women.

This of course runs counter to the public perception, juiced by the media, that black men are all players with no intention of sticking around. Thus the flood of comments to NPR’s website expressing both doubt and some possible reasons for this surprising finding.

Some thought the problem lay in the fact that black women outnumber black men in college degrees, and therefore, as “assortative mating” would have it, they’re not looking to marry “down.” Two-thirds of all bachelor’s degrees awarded to African-Americans in 2009-2010 went to women. “Black women face the thinnest pool of same-race partners of any group in the country,” Ralph Richard Banks, author of Is Marriage for White People? was quoted as saying. His book  caused a stir when he recommended that black women marry outside their race instead of marrying down. Black men, it would seem, are already doing that. Indeed, exacerbating this shallow pool is the fact that, according to research,  for black men, as education increases so does their likelihood of interracial marriage.

Others speculated that black women place higher priority on a man’s ability to earn and contribute to the household income, and given the frequently bleak job market for many black men, they’re skeptical. As Maria Kefalas and her coauthor Kathy Edin have documented in their superb book,  “Promises I Can Keep,”  lower-income single mothers often institute a “pay to stay” rule, and if a guy can’t pay his share (or more), then there’s no reason to get married. Donna Franklin, in her book, What’s Love Got to Do With It? Understanding and Healing the Rift Between Black Men and Women, notes that black women graduates of elite schools are more often in breadwinning roles. Black women in these relationships earned 63 percent of the household income, compared with white women graduates, who earned 40 percent.

A caveat worth considering, however:  Although there are significantly more college-educated black women than men, only about half of college-educated black men are currently married. If the issue is simply men’s marriageability, one would expect a significantly higher fraction of college-educated black men to be married.

Others thought it might be a case of the “Bradley effect,” the desire to answer in a socially acceptable way. Still others thought it might be definitional– what do you mean by “long-term” in a relationship.

Still others have suggested that it’s black women’s fault. In  Black Woman Redefined: Dispelling Myths and Discovering Fulfillment in the Age of Michelle Obama, Sophia Nelson lays it out for them, listing the reasons why black men prefer white women. Top of the list is that black women are too domineering and too controlling for their own good. (seriously). Reminds me of Steve Harvey’s latest, Act Like a Lady: Think Like a Man.  Will it ever stop?

Or here’s a thought. It could be that Hollywood and the media have (gasp) been feeding us images of black men that don’t align with reality. Maybe we just think black men don’t want long-term relationships.

Either way, the debate will no doubt wage on. Interestingly, there were few notable differences by age, so the current crop of young adults does not seem to be bucking the trend.

New Media and Young Adults–Not All Bad News

A new review of the research on digital media use among twenty-somethings finds generally good news for the role of technology in young people’s lives–or at least not the dire consequences that many have predicted. In “Emerging in a Digital World: A Decade Review of Media Use, Effects, and Gratifications in Emerging Adulthood,” Sarah Coyne and her colleagues examine the role of media in identity-shaping, social skills, school performance, and much more, among those aged 18-28. 

Talk to nearly anyone over age 50 and they’ll kvetch about the lack of social skills among young adults today–most famously Sherry Turkle in “The Flight from Conversation,” and her book, Alone Together. “They don’t know how to talk face to face,” or “They’re unable to relate to real people.” Well, that turns out not to be the case. As the authors find, studies show that:

“Although the effects of media on relationships varies as a function of medium, it appears that for most emerging adults, use of SNSs compliments or facilitates real-world relationships, rather than replacing or harming them.” In fact, “For each hour increase on average in social network [Facebook] exposure or cell phone communication, average face-to-face social interaction increased about 10–15 min.”

But are those relationships deep? Signs suggest they are, eventually. Greater intimacy emerges with layers of media use. Facebook may be a shallow introduction to people, but it does launch a connection that can be picked up and furthered with texting or ichats/google hangouts. Skype brings people face to face virtually, and eventually, people do meet up in person. Really. Here’s a nice review of the latest back-and-forth on this issue.

Another area of worry is violence, particularly as the tragic mass shootings perpetrated by young men in their 20s. Many claim that violent video games are a spark that sets off or nurtures violent tendencies among young men. While the authors find ample support in the research for short-term jolts of aggression and antisocial behavior among twenty-somethings (in this case college students) after exposure to media violence, the real problem arises in early childhood. More important to violent behaviors than watching hours of first-person shooter video games as a 20-year-old is a steady diet of violent media in childhood. As the authors write:

Yet, exposure to media violence as a child (and the corresponding childhood aggression) is a far better predictor of aggression in adulthood than exposure to media violence as an adult,  and so it is possible that much of the direct damage may have already been done by the time a child reaches emerging adulthood.

On the other side of the coin, media with positive messages–whether lyrics to a song or a YouTube video with a helping message, also shapes behavior–in a good way.

One of the biggest tasks in teen and young adult years is figuring out who you are. Today, young adults are forging their identity with the help of Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and YouTube. They are preening and pruning what they post and the “me” they present to the world in their creations.  But how much of that online identity is “real” is open for debate. It is commonly known that the “face” people present on Facebook is scrubbed clean–presenting our most hilarious, witty, and popular selves. It is interesting nonetheless to watch teens and young adults grapple with this “second self,” one cloaked behind a veneer of truth perhaps but still a pathway to identity formation.

Another aspect to online identity formation is sometimes overlooked: the freedom to escape any real-world restrictions. Take, for example, this story about kids in India from different castes and youth in American prisons. Technology allowed them to move beyond their imposed identities as lesser individuals and be free to express who they see themselves as becoming. As the story notes, ”

Just as the children in India were able to operate outside their caste in their virtual world, the incarcerated youth organized themselves according to their skills and talents and focused on the goal of becoming more engaged citizens.

“In the virtual world, they were not kids in jail,” Panganiban says.

Still another aspect often glossed over in this new digital era is the shift from passive consumer to active creator. The digital tools at young people’s fingertips are tools that allow easy access to sharing, writing, remixing, and yes, acting. One white paper finds that those who were active online in social causes were more likely to take that energy offline and join up or volunteer, if shown how to get involved. Researchers have coined a new phrase for this digital-mediated, self-interest-driven form of action: participatory politics. This more active role as media creators likely shifts the balance, and effect, in the media relationship.

Consider magazines–a passive, “old” media. Flipping through the latest issue of People or Self magazine while waiting to get your hair cut or on the morning subway is often one of life’s guilty little pleasures. But as Coyne and her colleagues find in their review, for teens and twenty-something women, even just 15 minutes with those pictures of models can be a real challenge to self-esteem. As the authors note, “Laboratory experiments have shown decreased body satisfaction among female college students with as little as 15 min of exposure to fitness and health magazines.”

Yet while paging through a magazine (old media) with images of impossibly beautiful and thin women is a self-defeating exercise, creating your own mashup of those images to make a political statement is an empowering act. And new media allow for that direct action.

Interestingly, the research shows that by their mid-30s, women are less uncomfortable with their own bodies. Tell that to women in the Dove self-image experiment. The soap company, known for its more realistic and sensitive portrayals of women in advertising, asked women to describe their faces to a forensic sketch artist. The artist then sketched their face according to their descriptions and another sketch of what they really looked like. The results showed the women’s images of themselves as always more homely than the real sketch.

Coyne and colleagues’ review is a good start, although it does miss many of the more well-known media scholars, like danah boyd, Eszter Hargittai, and Mimi Ito. And unfortunately for researchers studying media in the digital era, the glacial pace of journal publication and scholarly research means that by the time they get to print, the media has changed, resulting in some reportage that sounds a little like a 19th century anthropologist in the bush. “With the development of new technologies, such as MP3 players, listening to music has become increasingly portable and accessible for emerging adults….” Or this: “The authors hypothesize that college students are likely using cellular phone communication and [social networks] to plan face-to-face communication with friends, as well as using them as additional mechanisms for meeting new people and keeping in touch with others.” I’d say that’s a safe hypothesis.

One wonders whether studying social networks like Facebook is even worth it in the end. Teens and twenty-somethings move on to the next big thing in rapid order. Indeed, there’s already signs that Facebook is over. Too much drama.

 

Underemployed (and Disillusioned) Young Adults, New Survey Finds

Many underemployed young adults regret their college decisions and are frustrated in their jobs, according to a recent survey of 1,279 young people aged 21 to 35 by the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools (ACICS). The respondents were either currently underemployed (working in a job for which they are overqualified); unemployed, or in a job but seriously considering changing jobs soon.

Today’s competitive job market favors those with practical skills and experience, the authors of the report argue, and too many young people are not coming out of college with those kinds of skills.

“This research,” says Al Gray, executive director of ACICS, in a press release, shows how “educational institutions can better produce graduates who ultimately secure professional, technical and occupational positions in the workplace.”

Among the key findings:

• 51% of respondents say they would have chosen a different educational path in retrospect.

• 60% of those with only a high school degree would have chosen a different path, as would have 53% of those with a two-year degree and 48% of those with a four-year degree.

• Only 27% of employed respondents say they’re very satisfied with their current job.

• An overwhelming 81% of employed respondents say they’re interested in changing jobs in the near future – and 66% say they’re willing to relocate to a different part of the country to do so.

• 51% of employed respondents say they’re not in their preferred field of work, and 41% say their current job is “for the time being with no real future.” That said, three-fourths felt they were prepared with the skills to find a new job.

Today’s job market favors those with practical skills and experience:

• Only 32% of those with a liberal arts degree say the job market is “easy,” compared to 58% of those with a health-related degree that is potentially more applicable to a specific field of work.

• 59% of those who completed a paid internship or apprenticeship describe the job market as easy – while 61% of those who did not describe it as difficult.

    • 54% of employers said it was hard to find an applicant with the necessary skill set.
    • The underemployed generation underestimates the hard skills and professional capabilities employers are seeking in applicants. One-third of young adults thought hard skills were important in hiring decisions, while 56% of employers did.
    •  Young adults overestimate their skills – especially their written and problem-solving skills – compared with feedback provided by hiring decision-makers

For more information about the survey, visit www.acics.org.

 

 

College Success for Low-Income Students

 

We spend $1 billion each year on helping disadvantaged students succeed in college. Yet we are left with “mostly failed programs interspersed with modest success,” write Brookings Institution’s Ron Haskins, and Princeton’s Cecilia Rouse (a Network member) in the policy brief accompanying the latest edition of The Future of Children.

It is time for a new approach, the issue argues. The existing four major college-readiness programs focused on low-income students–Upward Bound, Upward Bound Math and Science, GEAR UP, and Talent Search– offer some “hints about what could make a difference,” they write. “These may be the threads from which we can begin to weave together a new kind of intervention program.”

Attending college, whether two-year or four-year, is a passport to higher earnings, and the authors argue, to reducing the stark inequality that has taken hold since the 1980s. As Lisa Barrow and colleagues write in the opening article of the journal, “individuals with a bachelor’s degree earn 50 percent more during their lifetime than individuals with no more than a high school diploma, and their unemployment rate is less than half as high.” Unemployment rates, even during the recent deep recession, are significantly lower as well.

Yet far too many never make it to graduation day. Half of all students who enroll at a postsecondary institution fail to complete a degree or a certificate within six years. Part of this is failure on the part of schools and the students themselves in preparing for college-level work. According to research by Sean Reardon, the rich-poor gap in test scores is about 40 percent larger now than it was 30 years ago.

The authors in this issue argue for taking that $1 billion that the government spends annually on four college-preparation programs and consolidate them into a single grant program. To keep the federal funding, organizations must show, based on rigorous analysis, that they are helping disadvantaged students graduate from college. This kind of accountability, they argue, is imperative. Applicants must demonstrate they were using evidence-based interventions, and they must prove they have a history of success, and good data showing that success. The more rigorous the evidence, the more likely the group will qualify for funding.

They also call for funding of a broad variety of successful approaches (for example, summer programs, mentoring, tutoring, help with financial aid) to establish a “set of evidence-based methods that other organizations could replicate.”

The Department of Education, they argue, should use up to 2 percent of its annual funds ($20 million) to plan a coordinated program of research and demonstration to determine whether well-defined interventions or specific activities such as mentoring or tutoring, for example, increase college enrollment and completion. Without investing in this R&D, “college preparate programs are likely to continue their poor performance,” Haskins and Rouse write.

“Some will think our recommendations harsh. But social policy should be based on evidence, and everything we know leads to teh view that many, if not most, social programs produce modest or no effects. The Obama administration’s reform of Head Start shows that a major ingredient of evidence-based policy is to reform or terminate ineffective programs. We should apply the same tough-minded approach to college preparation.

 

Without it, too many youth will continue to flounder on the path to adulthood. Despite its costs, college is still a door-opener to a job and (eventual) good earnings. While there are numerous stories of high debt and pinched futures of recent college grads, the real story is with those who never go on to school after high school.

The numbers don’t lie.

  • Since the 1980s, the median family income of adults in their prime earning years has increased only for those with a four-year or advanced degree.
  • The odds of a young black man without a high school degree being in prison are higher than him having a job. African American men born in the mid-1970s who dropped out of high school have a two in three chance of being incarcerated.
  • The number of “disconnected youth” — those neither working nor in school is at record highs.
  • Young adults from families earning $20,000 or less (the bottom earnings quintile) with a college degree are nearly 80 percent less likely to wind up in the bottom fifth themselves than their peers who do not have a four-year degree.

While college is still worth it, it is not a decision to enter lightly, or without preparation. See Lisa Barrow and coauthors’ article  and Philip Oreopoulos and Uros Petronijevic’s article for a sound assessment of the value of college (and its drawbacks for the less-than-strategic). Helping students prepare for college, including understanding the necessity of being strategic about which schools, which majors, and how much to borrow, are critical not only to the students’ own futures, but to the nation’s as a whole.

Liberal Arts Majors Cause Wages to Fall, or Do They?

 

In the immortal words of Hustle and Flow, “it’s hard out here for an English Lit major.” Wages for college grads have been stagnant or falling since 2000, and some are blaming liberal arts majors for flooding the market and dragging down wages.

James Pethokoukis, whose blog post, “Harvard, we have a problem: Too many liberal arts majors” says it all, argues that

1) “Over the past 25 years, the total number of students in college has increased by about 50 percent. But the number of students graduating with degrees in STEM subjects has remained more or less constant”; and

2) “In 2009, the United States graduated 89,140 students in the visual and performing arts, more than in computer science, math, and chemical engineering combined and more than double the number of visual-and-performing-arts graduates in 1985.”

Ergo, liberal arts majors are flooding the market and driving down wages.

But Lawrence Mishel, at the Economic Policy Institute, looked more closely at this trend, and tried to add some science to the claim that STEM (science, engineering, and math) wages are suffering because.

As he argues, there hasn’t been a surge in liberal arts majors, so the prospect of a sudden flood is unlikely.

If the 2009 composition (across 18 different majors) of employment across fields prevailed in 2001 at the  wages of each  field in 2001, then the average wage would have been … drum roll … 0.1 percent higher. That is, the impact of changes in the composition of fields over the 2001 to 2009 period was ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. The drop in entry-level wages happened within the particular fields of study, not because of the fields that students studied.

Math aside, others are asking kinda the same question. Tim Cook in Pittsburgh, for example, is asking, why don’t more people leave college with both intellectual foundations and practical skills?  Cook wants kids to focus on both the humanities and a trade.

Cook, with an English Lit degree, has started the Saxifrage School, which upends the notion that you have to learn in a classroom on a campus–and the costs that come along with it. He is offering classes for $395 a piece, with courses taught by working professionals and craftsmen as well as adjuncts and Ph.D students. The conceit is–which also lowers costs–that all classes take place across the city, at the local libraries, YMCA, mechanics’ shops, and other spots. No desks, no quads, no ivy-covered walls.  A graphic-design course is taught in a coffee shop. A course on organic agriculture uses the boiler room in an abandoned city pool house for its seed-starting workshop.

He’s snagged the attention of local foundations in Pittsburgh and hopes to have 500 students within a few years, according to an article in the Wall Street Journal.

It seems a little redundant to the community college and trade school ecosystem, but it could perhaps burnish the reputation of “the trades,” which get little respect these days, despite decent jobs awaiting those with such skills. If a hipster like Cook does it, it’s bound to gain some traction among young adults, who are particularly enamored–at least in Brooklyn and Portland–with hands-on, back to basics, do-it-yourself everything, from brewing beer to raising chickens.

And, I can’t help but notice this kind of innovative thinking is coming from a liberal arts major.