Resources on Racial Injustice in America From Georgetown CEW

At CEW, we have long studied the equity gaps in educational access and opportunity that stem from a long history of racial injustice in the United States. These inequities are mirrored in the workforce in the form of wage discrimination and lack of career mobility.

We will continue to analyze the data behind these realities and create content that highlights these injustices. Below you’ll find a collection of our reports, blog posts, op-eds, and videos that capture the steady drumbeat of our findings that illustrate this grave problem in our country. We encourage you to explore and share these resources as we all continue engaging in dialogue about race in America.

Book

• The Merit Myth: How Our Colleges Favor the Rich and Divide America

Reports

• Race, Elite College Admissions, and the Courts: The Pursuit of Racial Equality in Education Retreats to K–12 Schools
• Race-Conscious Affirmative Action: What’s Next
• The College Where Low-Income Students Get the Highest ROI
• Youth Policy: How Can We Smooth the Rocky Pathway to Adulthood?
• Navigating the College-to-Career Pathway: The 10 Rules of Moving from Youth Dependency to Adult Economic Independence
• If Not Now, When? The Urgent Need for an All-One System Approach to Youth Policy
• The College Payoff: More Education Doesn’t Always Mean More Earnings
• Mission Not Accomplished: Unequal Opportunities and Outcomes for Black and Latinx Engineers
• The Cost of Racial and Economic Injustice in Postsecondary Education
• The Unequal Race for Good Jobs: How Whites Made Outsized Gains in Education and Good Jobs Compared to Blacks and Latinos
• SAT-Only Admission: How Would It Change College Campuses?
• Born to Win, Schooled to Lose: Why Equally Talented Students Don’t Get Equal Chances to Be All They Can Be
• Our Separate & Unequal Public Colleges: How Public Colleges Reinforce White Racial Privilege and Marginalize Black and Latino Students
• Separate and Unequal: How Higher Education Reinforces the Intergenerational Reproduction of White Racial Privilege

Blog Posts

• Affirmative Action and the Future of Education Reform
• Going Backwards on Our Commitment to Racial Justice
• The Supreme Court’s Decision on Race-Conscious Admissions Cements Racial Inequality in America
• Black Workers Have Made Sizeable Gains in Education and Good Jobs
• 10 Highest Paying Majors for Black College Graduates
• Vaccinations Have Ramped Up, But Has Distribution Been Equitable?
• White Flight to the Bachelor’s Degree
• Strivers Like NASA’s Katherine Johnson Deserve Equal Opportunities
• Latinos in the COVID-19 Economy
• Racial Gaps in Lost Unemployment Income Divide Americans in the COVID-19 Downturn
• Education, Race, and Jobs in the COVID-19 Crisis
• Who’s Working From Home: The Education Divide
• Our Higher Education System Is Split into Unequal Tracks Divided by Race

Op-Eds

• International Higher Education: Declining Enrollments in Community Colleges: America’s Economic Divide
• Chronicle of Higher Education: How Higher Ed Can Stop Affirmative Action for Rich White People
• MarketWatch: With Coronavirus, Policy Makers Have a Rare Opportunity to Pressure Top Universities to Make Admissions Fairer
• Education Week: ‘Better to Be Born Rich Than Smart’: Education Must Answer for Systemic Inequality
• Washington Post: White flight is creating a separate and unequal system of higher education

Videos

• The Unequal Race for Good Jobs

White workers are more likely than Black or Latino workers to have a good job at every level of educational attainment.

• Born to Win, Schooled to Lose

The most talented disadvantaged youth have lower chances of success than the least talented advantaged youth.

• Our Separate & Unequal Public Colleges

Elite public four-year colleges do not represent the populations they are supposed to serve.

• White Flight in America’s Colleges

What we see in today’s colleges is a far cry from a united path to prosperity — it’s a chasm demarcated by race.

This post was updated on February 21, 2024, to include recent research.

The Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce is an independent, nonprofit research and policy institute affiliated with the Georgetown McCourt School of Public Policy that studies the link between education, career qualifications, and workforce demands.

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