The new racial generation gap

This new diverse majority of young people will have far fewer advantages compared with the white-majority boomers in the ’60s. Although high school dropout rates among young black and Latino students have been falling, four-year college enrollment is well below whites’, a situation compounded by high attrition rates. Should these patterns continue, the nation will see an absolute drop in college graduates after 2020. Moreover, income inequality is hitting the younger minority generations particularly hard, as evidenced by their continuing high rates of child poverty. It is still the case that many blacks and Latinos attend highly segregated, under-resourced public schools and lack the finances and guidance to get into postsecondary programs that are the best pathways to the middle class.

These facts, and America’s inevitable demographic future, put recent campus protests into sharp perspective. The complaints voiced by black, Latinos and other minority students (and their white allies) strongly indicate that a racially prejudicial environment still exists at four-year colleges, which remain more white (61%) than the students in the K-12 pipeline. Yet it is imperative that minority students succeed at these colleges. These slow-to-change institutions must successfully invest in diversity, making minorities’ contributions, voices and concerns central to their educational mission…

The baby boomers in particular need to hear the message. Now in their 50s and 60s, too many of them are more concerned with lowering their taxes than investing in the younger generation. Given the choice between a larger government that offers more services and a smaller government with limited services and lower taxes, white boomers are far more likely than millennial or Gen X minorities to choose the latter, according to a 2013 Pew survey. And it has been shown that those states with the largest gains in minority children, but mostly white seniors — including Texas, California, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and Arizona — rank among the lowest third of states on a measure of child well-being that includes education, health and other areas in which state government programs can assist.