A new study shows a disheartening reality for African-Americans without a high school diploma. According to an online analysis of unemployment data by Remapping Debate, more than half of all male African-American high school dropouts are unemployed.
While still staggeringly high, the unemployment rate for Blacks who graduated from high school is almost half that of high school dropouts, at 26 percent. That number is almost four times the national average.
“This is an emergency, this is a catastrophe [but Washington is] not rating it as a catastrophe,” said the site’s editor, Craig Gurian, told The Daily Caller.
African-American males who dropped out of high school have a total unemployment rate of 51.6 percent. When Black female dropouts are added to the mix the unemployment rate for all African-American dropouts is 30 percent, said the report, showcasing the stark difference between the genders.
Even more disconcerting, those rates do not include people who have given up looking for work or part-time workers who want full-time jobs, according to Gurian.
The online data shows the unemployment rates for 270 subgroups of Americans analyzed over a 12-month period.
“What we do is analyze unemployment data from the Current Population Survey of the Census Bureau (the data that are used by the Bureau of Labor Statistics) from 2006 to the present — data for February 2013 (released in full by the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey earlier this month) are now integrated,” said a statement on the group’s website. “In order to account for seasonal variation and to reduce the margin of error, the results reported for each month represent a moving average of that month and the preceding 11 months.”
Comparatively, the unemployment rate for African-American college graduates is 6.2 percent. It is 6.2 percent for Hispanic college grads.
White men with a college degree have the lowest level of unemployment, at only 2.9 percent, when averaged over the last year, according to the analysis. The unemployment rate for all college grads is 3.9 percent.
The unemployment rate is 18.9 percent for young people who only graduate from high-school and did not attend any college. It is 27.4 percent for all people who did quit high school without a diploma.
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