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Yahoo
8 hours ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Brookings Metro Unveils Dashboard To Help Cities Track And Close Gaps In Black Business Ownership
Brookings Metro's Center for Community Uplift recently revealed its new Black Business Parity Dashboard, a tool that it will use to help policymakers, organizers, and other community members to make the potential impact of Black residents entrepreneurship a reality through providing data that shows what those businesses would look like if they were equitably funded in proportion to their population share. According to Brookings, the tool examined Atlanta, which is seen as one of America's Black Meccas, and found that if the population share of Atlanta was matched by Black businesses, its 14,000 Black-owned businesses would become 63,000 Black-owned businesses, a dramatic increase. Similarly, in Detroit, where there are almost 2,800 Black-owned businesses, if that number was adjusted along the lines of Detroit's Black population share, it would result in more than 23,000 Black-owned firms which would create approximately 460,000 jobs for Detroit's metro area, which could contribute to the city's economic recovery from decades of job and population losses. The tool helps prove what a group of researchers asserted in their 2021 analysis of a deadly precondition for Black businesses for the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, the racial wealth divide, which also affects how Black businesses are invested in and discouraged from scaling up because they don't have the capital necessary to expand their footprints. According to the analysis from Dedrick Asante-Muhammad, Dr. Jared Ball, Jamie Buell, and Joshua Devine, 'To produce more personal and community wealth from Black entrepreneurship, public and private sector spending should be intentionally channeled to Black-owned businesses.' Although the findings of their research focus on the pandemic, their findings dovetail with the stated aims of the Black Business Parity Dashboard, which are to give city and community leaders the tools to visualize what a greater and more targeted investment in Black-owned businesses could produce in their metro areas. Indeed, according to a 2024 analysis of the economic impact of Black-owned small businesses by The Reynolds Center for Business Journalism, per data from the 2021 Census; 161,031 Black-owned businesses produced $206 billion in revenue, which suggests that if these businesses were quadrupled, which some of the models in the dashboard say would be the case, that revenue number could become even more impressive. As Brookings advised in 2020, the key to unlocking the American economy lies in increasing investments in Black-owned businesses, as they noted, 'the underrepresentation of Black businesses is costing the U.S. economy millions of jobs and billions of dollars in unrealized revenues,' but their prescription for solving that problem then, as the Dashboard makes clear now, is to create parity for the nation's Black-owned businesses. According to Ashleigh Gardere, senior advisor to the president at PolicyLink, solutions for how to address the racial wealth gap can also be applied to Black-owned businesses. 'DBE programs and small business training will never be enough to close the racial wealth gap in America—that's just tinkering at the edges. We need racial equity standards in the private sector: from greater access to capital beyond traditional debt to new and reparative financial products, from private sector business opportunities to narrative change strategies that center and celebrate Black businesses.' RELATED CONTENT: OPINION: Tariffs Are Squeezing Black-Owned Businesses—Here's How We Fix It
CNN
13-04-2025
- Business
- CNN
Analysis: Trump's drive against top universities could carry a big economic cost
President Donald Trump's offensive against elite universities is also an assault on the nation's most economically dynamic metropolitan areas — and a threat to America's global competitiveness. From Boston and Austin to Seattle and Silicon Valley, these elite research universities have served as the catalysts for growth in the nation's most productive regional economies. They have produced a steady stream of scientific breakthroughs and skilled young graduates who flow into companies pursuing cutting-edge technologies in computing, communications, artificial intelligence, medical equipment, biotechnology, pharmaceuticals and other advanced industries. 'This is the fundamental economic geography of the high-value, advanced industry system in America,' said Mark Muro, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Brookings Metro think tank. 'This is American industrial policy at work.' But now the Trump administration is threatening to stall this economic engine by terminating research grants for major universities, cutting overall federal support for scientific research, and deporting international students over their political activities. 'This is about the well-being of our constituents and it's also about the future of our communities,' Boston Mayor Michelle Wu said in an interview. The research grants the Trump administration is rescinding, she said, 'are not on or off switches that affect (only) the current moment or current generation; these are investments in our collective future.' For communities whose economies revolve around major research universities, she said, stopping Trump's moves against them represents 'survival stakes.' Despite some improvement for Trump in the 2024 election, the regions surrounding these big universities voted preponderantly against him last year. So, in targeting elite research universities that conservatives deride as strongholds of 'the woke mind virus,' Trump may believe he is hurting only places already hostile to him. But because these universities are so integrated into their surrounding regions, Trump cannot hurt these campuses without also harming the metro areas leading the country's domestic economic growth. And because those metro areas have become the nation's principal incubators of scientific and technological advances, harming them also harms the nation's international competitiveness, particularly as it faces a mounting challenge from China in critical emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence and electric vehicles. In the global competition for 21st-century economic supremacy, Trump's wide-ranging assault on America's top research institutions may come to be seen as a profound act of unilateral disarmament. Collaboration among the government, academia and business to promote scientific and technological advances traces back to the earliest days of American history. But the partnership between the government and universities ascended to a new height during World War II. Under the leadership of Vannevar Bush, a legendary engineer and university administrator, Washington enlisted academic scientists into the war effort to an unprecedented extent (a process that included the Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb). A landmark report from Bush in 1945 inspired the creation of the National Science Foundation in 1950 to promote basic research in science and engineering. The National Institutes of Health has long provided parallel support for basic medical research. Washington further expanded its role in nurturing basic research after the Soviet Union shocked the world by launching the Sputnik satellite in 1957. The big increase in federal support for education and scientific research after Sputnik was the moment when 'universities and government became joined in terms of the future of this society,' said Ira Harkavy, director of the Netter Center for Community Partnerships at the University of Pennsylvania. The fruits of that collaboration included the scientific advances that produced the semiconductor and the internet. In recent decades, basic scientific research conducted at elite universities has become the cornerstone of America's most innovative industries, said Martin Kenney, a professor in the Community and Regional Development Program at the University of California at Davis. Since about 1980, he said, the US 'innovation system' has informally evolved into a three-step process in which new technologies start with basic research at academic institutions; are honed at startup companies funded through venture capital; and ultimately are commercialized at scale once those startups are bought by larger existing companies or taken to the stock market through initial public offerings. 'That was the way the United States decided to compete globally and (to develop) the highest-end technology,' Kenney said. That genealogy is evident in many of the nation's most economically vibrant metropolitan areas. Many cities now benefit from large amounts of direct employment and local purchases from medical and academic institutions — what urban planners call 'meds and eds.' But even greater may be the spinoff economic effects from big scientific and medical institutions. The regions that house the nation's most advanced companies in fields such as biotechnology, computing and artificial intelligence almost all orbit around world-class universities and medical centers, which have generated both scientific breakthroughs and a talent pipeline critical to those industries' growth. Places that have benefited from this dynamic include Boston, Chicago, the San Francisco Bay Area, Houston, Los Angeles and the Research Triangle in North Carolina (with three universities each among the top 100 recipients in federal research grants); New York City (with four); and Austin, Seattle and Madison, Wisconsin, each of which is home to its state's flagship public university, also a top 100 grant recipient. A Brookings Metro analysis provided exclusively to CNN found that of the 100 US counties that generate the most economic output, 44 are home to a university that ranks among the top 100 in receiving federal research grants. Forty-one of the 100 counties producing the most economic output also contain at least one or more of the 100 institutions graduating the most PhDs in science and engineering. (Several other top 100 output counties, like San Mateo outside San Francisco and Essex outside Boston, benefit from the economic activity spun off from nearby universities even though they don't house one themselves.) These counties far outpunch their weight in generating economic activity. The 44 high-output counties that house at least one major research university represent less than 1.5% of the nation's roughly 3,100 counties. But they generate nearly 35% of the nation's total economic output, Brookings Metro found. 'People look at the US innovation system as something that is immutable and durable,' Muro said. 'But these are actually delicate ecosystems that have been built up over 50 years. This is one of the great achievements of post-World War II American economic development. And that could be gravely disrupted here.' The explosive growth in Madison and its suburbs show how these pieces fit together. Many of the region's biggest employers trace their products back to research conducted at the University of Wisconsin at Madison (which ranks No. 15 as a recipient of federal research grants) and recruit university graduates as workers, said Zach Brandon, president of the Greater Madison Chamber of Commerce. These include a concentration of companies developing advanced medical treatments and technologies, led by Epic, the huge software company that created the MyChart app and was founded by a University of Wisconsin graduate. The success of these companies, which has made Madison the state's fastest-growing area, demonstrates that 'when you really think about making what's next, inventing the future, that's happening because of research at our world class universities,' Brandon said. On multiple fronts, the Trump administration is now threatening that pipeline from academia to business. It has canceled, suspended or announced reviews into billions of dollars in combined federal grants to seven institutions that rank among the 100 top recipients of government research funds: Columbia, Harvard, Princeton, Brown and the University of Pennsylvania, with Northwestern and Cornell added to the list last week. The administration has targeted these institutions primarily because of their response to campus protests against the war in Gaza, but also over their policies on racial diversity in admissions, cooperation with immigration enforcement and allowing transgender women to compete in sports. Another 19 universities that rank among the top 100 federal grant recipients were among those notified in a March letter from the Education Department that they faced the possible funding losses over allegations of failing to protect students from antisemitism. Separately, Johns Hopkins University lost $800 million in grants and contracts from the administration's sweeping cuts at the US Agency for International Development, which forced it to dismiss some 2,000 employees. Simultaneously, the administration has slowed the distribution of National Science Foundation grants: One recent analysis found the NSF approved about 50% fewer grants in the first two months of Trump's second term as it did in the equivalent period last year. Last week, the NSF announced it is funding fellowships for only half as many graduate students as it did last year. The White House did not respond to a request for comment about the economic implications of its policies toward scientific research and major universities. No Trump policy change has rattled academia more than the National Institutes of Health's February announcement that it is slashing the share of federal research dollars that universities can apply to ongoing overhead costs. Universities have relied on those so-called indirect expenses to build the infrastructure that underpins their scientific research, from constructing labs to hiring support staff. The administration has defended the change as an effort to ensure that more federal dollars flow directly into research rather than ancillary activities. But scientists and university administrators have said the change would force massive cutbacks in research. Earlier this month, a district court judge in Maryland permanently blocked Trump from making the change, but the Republican-appointed Supreme Court majority has already overturned several similar lower court rulings. Supporters of university research see another threat: the administration's repeated moves to deport foreign students, including several for political viewpoints they expressed about the Israel-Hamas war. 'If you are a smart kid in India or China, you are going to ask: 'Why am I going to go to the United States?'' Kenney said. These pincer moves have divided academic administrators, with some schools conceding to the administration's demands (such as Columbia) and others pledging to fight them (Princeton). But the implications of these cutbacks will reverberate far beyond campus walls. 'It's not just the university presidents who are nervous; it's going to be the regional economic developers and the regional business leaders who will be extremely concerned about the interruptions that are coming,' Muro said. Brandon, of Madison, is one of those concerned business leaders. He's working to revive an organization of local chambers of commerce to lobby Washington to support federal funding for scientific research. 'The basic research of today is the applied research of tomorrow and is the innovation of the future,' he said. 'If we turn off that tap, sure you could go four years, you can maybe go eight years, but eventually the innovation drought comes.' Wu, the Boston mayor, similarly organized a bipartisan group of 45 local officials to join the lawsuit to block the administration's cuts in indirect costs for NIH grant recipients. Trump's offensive against research universities, she said, 'is different from what has ever happened before, where individual communities and industries are being targeted and punished.' Trump gained ground in 2024 in the nation's most economically productive places, but they still voted heavily against him. According to Brookings Metro, former Vice President Kamala Harris won 40 of the 44 high-output counties that also house at least one top research university. Those 40 counties alone accounted for nearly 40% of Harris' votes nationwide; the four top counties Trump won in that group, by contrast, accounted for only 5% of his votes. Even the domestic political consequences of Trump's moves against major universities, though, may pale beside the international implications. Some scientific and business leaders have described China's striking recent advances in AI technology as a modern equivalent to the Sputnik shock that galvanized the nation in the late 1950s. Yet Trump is responding in exactly the opposite way as the nation did then, when it surged federal support for research and education. 'If we are going to have a 'Sputnik moment' on AI and (related) technologies,' Muro said, 'this does not seem like a winning response.' Trump's escalating war against top-tier American universities and the big blue metros that orbit them might channel his base's antagonism toward 'coastal elites,' but the ultimate winner in this confrontation may be China.
CNN
13-04-2025
- Business
- CNN
Analysis: Trump's drive against top universities could carry a big economic cost
President Donald Trump's offensive against elite universities is also an assault on the nation's most economically dynamic metropolitan areas — and a threat to America's global competitiveness. From Boston and Austin to Seattle and Silicon Valley, these elite research universities have served as the catalysts for growth in the nation's most productive regional economies. They have produced a steady stream of scientific breakthroughs and skilled young graduates who flow into companies pursuing cutting-edge technologies in computing, communications, artificial intelligence, medical equipment, biotechnology, pharmaceuticals and other advanced industries. 'This is the fundamental economic geography of the high-value, advanced industry system in America,' said Mark Muro, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Brookings Metro think tank. 'This is American industrial policy at work.' But now the Trump administration is threatening to stall this economic engine by terminating research grants for major universities, cutting overall federal support for scientific research, and deporting international students over their political activities. 'This is about the well-being of our constituents and it's also about the future of our communities,' Boston Mayor Michelle Wu said in an interview. The research grants the Trump administration is rescinding, she said, 'are not on or off switches that affect (only) the current moment or current generation; these are investments in our collective future.' For communities whose economies revolve around major research universities, she said, stopping Trump's moves against them represents 'survival stakes.' Despite some improvement for Trump in the 2024 election, the regions surrounding these big universities voted preponderantly against him last year. So, in targeting elite research universities that conservatives deride as strongholds of 'the woke mind virus,' Trump may believe he is hurting only places already hostile to him. But because these universities are so integrated into their surrounding regions, Trump cannot hurt these campuses without also harming the metro areas leading the country's domestic economic growth. And because those metro areas have become the nation's principal incubators of scientific and technological advances, harming them also harms the nation's international competitiveness, particularly as it faces a mounting challenge from China in critical emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence and electric vehicles. In the global competition for 21st-century economic supremacy, Trump's wide-ranging assault on America's top research institutions may come to be seen as a profound act of unilateral disarmament. Collaboration among the government, academia and business to promote scientific and technological advances traces back to the earliest days of American history. But the partnership between the government and universities ascended to a new height during World War II. Under the leadership of Vannevar Bush, a legendary engineer and university administrator, Washington enlisted academic scientists into the war effort to an unprecedented extent (a process that included the Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb). A landmark report from Bush in 1945 inspired the creation of the National Science Foundation in 1950 to promote basic research in science and engineering. The National Institutes of Health has long provided parallel support for basic medical research. Washington further expanded its role in nurturing basic research after the Soviet Union shocked the world by launching the Sputnik satellite in 1957. The big increase in federal support for education and scientific research after Sputnik was the moment when 'universities and government became joined in terms of the future of this society,' said Ira Harkavy, director of the Netter Center for Community Partnerships at the University of Pennsylvania. The fruits of that collaboration included the scientific advances that produced the semiconductor and the internet. In recent decades, basic scientific research conducted at elite universities has become the cornerstone of America's most innovative industries, said Martin Kenney, a professor in the Community and Regional Development Program at the University of California at Davis. Since about 1980, he said, the US 'innovation system' has informally evolved into a three-step process in which new technologies start with basic research at academic institutions; are honed at startup companies funded through venture capital; and ultimately are commercialized at scale once those startups are bought by larger existing companies or taken to the stock market through initial public offerings. 'That was the way the United States decided to compete globally and (to develop) the highest-end technology,' Kenney said. That genealogy is evident in many of the nation's most economically vibrant metropolitan areas. Many cities now benefit from large amounts of direct employment and local purchases from medical and academic institutions — what urban planners call 'meds and eds.' But even greater may be the spinoff economic effects from big scientific and medical institutions. The regions that house the nation's most advanced companies in fields such as biotechnology, computing and artificial intelligence almost all orbit around world-class universities and medical centers, which have generated both scientific breakthroughs and a talent pipeline critical to those industries' growth. Places that have benefited from this dynamic include Boston, Chicago, the San Francisco Bay Area, Houston, Los Angeles and the Research Triangle in North Carolina (with three universities each among the top 100 recipients in federal research grants); New York City (with four); and Austin, Seattle and Madison, Wisconsin, each of which is home to its state's flagship public university, also a top 100 grant recipient. A Brookings Metro analysis provided exclusively to CNN found that of the 100 US counties that generate the most economic output, 44 are home to a university that ranks among the top 100 in receiving federal research grants. Forty-one of the 100 counties producing the most economic output also contain at least one or more of the 100 institutions graduating the most PhDs in science and engineering. (Several other top 100 output counties, like San Mateo outside San Francisco and Essex outside Boston, benefit from the economic activity spun off from nearby universities even though they don't house one themselves.) These counties far outpunch their weight in generating economic activity. The 44 high-output counties that house at least one major research university represent less than 1.5% of the nation's roughly 3,100 counties. But they generate nearly 35% of the nation's total economic output, Brookings Metro found. 'People look at the US innovation system as something that is immutable and durable,' Muro said. 'But these are actually delicate ecosystems that have been built up over 50 years. This is one of the great achievements of post-World War II American economic development. And that could be gravely disrupted here.' The explosive growth in Madison and its suburbs show how these pieces fit together. Many of the region's biggest employers trace their products back to research conducted at the University of Wisconsin at Madison (which ranks No. 15 as a recipient of federal research grants) and recruit university graduates as workers, said Zach Brandon, president of the Greater Madison Chamber of Commerce. These include a concentration of companies developing advanced medical treatments and technologies, led by Epic, the huge software company that created the MyChart app and was founded by a University of Wisconsin graduate. The success of these companies, which has made Madison the state's fastest-growing area, demonstrates that 'when you really think about making what's next, inventing the future, that's happening because of research at our world class universities,' Brandon said. On multiple fronts, the Trump administration is now threatening that pipeline from academia to business. It has canceled, suspended or announced reviews into billions of dollars in combined federal grants to seven institutions that rank among the 100 top recipients of government research funds: Columbia, Harvard, Princeton, Brown and the University of Pennsylvania, with Northwestern and Cornell added to the list last week. The administration has targeted these institutions primarily because of their response to campus protests against the war in Gaza, but also over their policies on racial diversity in admissions, cooperation with immigration enforcement and allowing transgender women to compete in sports. Another 19 universities that rank among the top 100 federal grant recipients were among those notified in a March letter from the Education Department that they faced the possible funding losses over allegations of failing to protect students from antisemitism. Separately, Johns Hopkins University lost $800 million in grants and contracts from the administration's sweeping cuts at the US Agency for International Development, which forced it to dismiss some 2,000 employees. Simultaneously, the administration has slowed the distribution of National Science Foundation grants: One recent analysis found the NSF approved about 50% fewer grants in the first two months of Trump's second term as it did in the equivalent period last year. Last week, the NSF announced it is funding fellowships for only half as many graduate students as it did last year. The White House did not respond to a request for comment about the economic implications of its policies toward scientific research and major universities. No Trump policy change has rattled academia more than the National Institutes of Health's February announcement that it is slashing the share of federal research dollars that universities can apply to ongoing overhead costs. Universities have relied on those so-called indirect expenses to build the infrastructure that underpins their scientific research, from constructing labs to hiring support staff. The administration has defended the change as an effort to ensure that more federal dollars flow directly into research rather than ancillary activities. But scientists and university administrators have said the change would force massive cutbacks in research. Earlier this month, a district court judge in Maryland permanently blocked Trump from making the change, but the Republican-appointed Supreme Court majority has already overturned several similar lower court rulings. Supporters of university research see another threat: the administration's repeated moves to deport foreign students, including several for political viewpoints they expressed about the Israel-Hamas war. 'If you are a smart kid in India or China, you are going to ask: 'Why am I going to go to the United States?'' Kenney said. These pincer moves have divided academic administrators, with some schools conceding to the administration's demands (such as Columbia) and others pledging to fight them (Princeton). But the implications of these cutbacks will reverberate far beyond campus walls. 'It's not just the university presidents who are nervous; it's going to be the regional economic developers and the regional business leaders who will be extremely concerned about the interruptions that are coming,' Muro said. Brandon, of Madison, is one of those concerned business leaders. He's working to revive an organization of local chambers of commerce to lobby Washington to support federal funding for scientific research. 'The basic research of today is the applied research of tomorrow and is the innovation of the future,' he said. 'If we turn off that tap, sure you could go four years, you can maybe go eight years, but eventually the innovation drought comes.' Wu, the Boston mayor, similarly organized a bipartisan group of 45 local officials to join the lawsuit to block the administration's cuts in indirect costs for NIH grant recipients. Trump's offensive against research universities, she said, 'is different from what has ever happened before, where individual communities and industries are being targeted and punished.' Trump gained ground in 2024 in the nation's most economically productive places, but they still voted heavily against him. According to Brookings Metro, former Vice President Kamala Harris won 40 of the 44 high-output counties that also house at least one top research university. Those 40 counties alone accounted for nearly 40% of Harris' votes nationwide; the four top counties Trump won in that group, by contrast, accounted for only 5% of his votes. Even the domestic political consequences of Trump's moves against major universities, though, may pale beside the international implications. Some scientific and business leaders have described China's striking recent advances in AI technology as a modern equivalent to the Sputnik shock that galvanized the nation in the late 1950s. Yet Trump is responding in exactly the opposite way as the nation did then, when it surged federal support for research and education. 'If we are going to have a 'Sputnik moment' on AI and (related) technologies,' Muro said, 'this does not seem like a winning response.' Trump's escalating war against top-tier American universities and the big blue metros that orbit them might channel his base's antagonism toward 'coastal elites,' but the ultimate winner in this confrontation may be China.
CNN
14-02-2025
- Politics
- CNN
The real obstacle for Trump's campaign against DEI isn't Democrats. It's demography
The escalating drive from President Donald Trump and other Republicans against programs to promote greater diversity in education and employment is on a collision course with fundamental changes in the nation's demographic make-up, particularly among the young. Conservative opponents of diversity initiatives have clearly seized the momentum in the policy debate. In 2023, the six Republican-appointed Supreme Court Justices joined in a decisive ruling to virtually eliminate the consideration of race of college admissions. Since taking office, Trump has followed with a flurry of executive orders to end 'diversity, equity and inclusion' programs within the federal government and to penalize private employers that utilize them — even to the point of potentially seeking criminal prosecutions. Facing this pressure, prominent companies in recent months have publicly renounced efforts to increase diversity in hiring or contracting. Democrats have been tentative and divided over how hard to push back against the conservative drive to eradicate the so-called DEI programs. But this diversity counteroffensive is advancing precisely as kids of color have become a solid majority of the nation's youth. Since the start of the 21st century, young Whites have been rapidly declining not only as a share of the overall youth population, but also in their absolute numbers — to an extent possibly unprecedented in American history. This tectonic reshaping of the American population means that demography, not Democrats, will likely emerge as the biggest obstacle to Trump's campaign to uproot DEI programs across US society. Democratic Senator Cory Booker tells Dana Bash the Trump administration is trying to distract the American people while "making us less safe, making government more corrupt and violating people's privacy." These demographic trends ensure that in the years ahead, the nation will increasingly rely on non-White young people as an increasing portion of its students, workers and taxpayers. Yet today, minority young people remain tremendously underrepresented at the most exclusive colleges and universities and in high-level, well-paying jobs across the private sector. Abandoning diversity programs even as the nation continues to grow more diverse could expose US society to two distinct risks. One is that as minorities make up a growing share of the future workforce, failing to equip more of them with advanced academic and technical skills could leave the nation short of the highly trained workers it will need as it transitions further into the information-age economy. 'The future of the nation's labor force productivity and economic well-being will rely heavily on the success and integration of today's and tomorrow's increasingly multiracial younger population,' William Frey, a demographer at the center-left Brookings Metro think tank, wrote recently. The other big risk is that under current trends the US could harden into a more overtly two-tier society, with a widening gap between the growing overall presence of minorities in the population and their limited representation in the most prestigious educational and employment opportunities. That could be a formula for even more social turbulence and alienation than the US has already experienced around current racial disparities. The pushback against diversity programs 'is an attempt to entrench racial discrimination and disparities at every level of society and to horde power and influence among what will soon be a minority population of White people and the wealthy,' said Janai Nelson, president and director-counsel of the Legal Defense Fund, a leading civil rights organization. 'Relegating … marginalized groups to second-class citizenship will upend the American experiment of multiracial democracy and reinstate a caste system — and that is the point. Indeed, if unchecked, these efforts will create levels of disenfranchisement and disillusionment yet unseen in our modern history,' Nelson said. Opponents of diversity programs argue there's no reason for concern even if White people hold on to most of the prestigious educational and employment opportunities as their overall numbers shrink. 'I think we need to get away from being concerned about the skin color of those who are occupying those positions,' said Jonathan Butcher, a senior fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation. 'I think we need to move to a point where we are concerned about what the individuals accomplish once they are there.' But civil rights advocates argue Trump and his allies are brewing a recipe for both social and economic strain by hobbling efforts to expand opportunities for minorities exactly as they represent more of the nation's future workforce. To these critics, the drive by Trump and his Republican allies to dismantle diversity programs at this transitional moment amounts to raising the castle walls of privilege against a rising tide of demographic change. 'If institutional gatekeepers don't ensure equal access to opportunity, this country will become even more dangerously stratified by race and future generations of Americans will be wholly incapable of meeting the challenges of an increasingly global landscape,' said Nelson. 'This is a recipe for disaster.' In this century, the change in the demographic composition of America's youth population has been swift and sustained. Kids of color increased their share of the nation's total under-18 population from 39.1% in 2000 to 51.6% in 2023, according to an analysis of Census Bureau data provided to CNN by Frey. This change has been broadly felt. Over that period, the minority share of the youth population has increased in all 50 states, according to Frey's calculations. In 18 states, kids of color already constitute more than half of the youth population. In six other states, minority kids make up at least 46% of the youth population, suggesting they will become the majority group before long. The change in the absolute numbers of the youth population may be even more revealing than these shifts in its proportions. Since 2000, the number of non-White kids has increased by just over 9.3 million, Frey found. Over that same period, the number of White kids has declined by nearly 8.8 million. In 47 of the 50 states, not only has the share of Whites younger than 18 declined since 2000, but so has their absolute number. The only states that have more White kids today than at the turn of the 21st century are Utah, Idaho and South Carolina — and even they have seen only small increases, totaling about 120,000 between them. By contrast, 30 states have at least 75,000 fewer White kids today than they did in 2000. Frey has calculated from Census data that the number of White kids shrank from 2000 to 2010 and from 2010 to 2020, and continued to fall from 2020 to 2023. He says there is likely no precedent in American history for such an extended decline in the number of White young people. Something similar may have happened 'during the Great Depression for a few years,' Frey told me. 'That's possible. But for most of our history as a country we've been growing. It's fair to say that this is the first time we've seen a decline like this for this length of time.' Nor does Frey see much possibility that the decline in both the share and absolute number of White kids will reverse any time soon. 'I don't see this decline reversing, because the White population is older and women in their child-bearing ages are getting to be a smaller share of that group,' Frey told me. Immigration, he adds, isn't likely to add many more White kids since most legal migrants, come from predominantly non-White countries. The Census projects the minority share of the youth population will reach 53% by 2030 and 60% by 2050. All of this guarantees that non-White kids will represent the principal source of workers for the 21st-century economy. As recently as 2000, White kids still represented nearly 70% of all high school graduates, according to the federal National Center for Education Statistics. But in the 2021-22 school year, young White people, for the first time, fell below the majority of high school graduates (at 49.4%), and their share has continued to tumble: The National Center projects that Whites will slip to 46% of all high school graduates next June and to as little as 43% of the graduating class in 2031. The NCES projects that 300,000 fewer White kids will graduate high school this year than in 2008. Enrollment in postsecondary education is moving along the same track. The Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce reported in a study last year that the number of White students attending colleges and universities plummeted by 375,000 from 2009 to 2019, the latest year for which they calculated detailed figures by race; the number of Black students tumbled by nearly 100,000 as well. All the growth in postsecondary attendance over that period came from Latino students (up about 190,000) and, to a much lesser, extent Asian Americans (up nearly 20,000). Yet kids of color continue to face systemic inequities at each stage of the journey from education into the workforce. Research, for instance, has consistently shown that student performance lags in elementary and secondary schools where poverty is pervasive; today, about three-fourths of Black and Latino students, compared to only about one-third of their Asian American and White counterparts, attend schools where at least half of students qualify as poor under federal definitions, according to the National Equity Atlas published by PolicyLink, a research and advocacy group, and the Equity Research Institute at the University of Southern California. Higher education likewise remains substantially stratified by race. About two-thirds of both Black and Latino students, Georgetown found, attend so-called open-access colleges, which are the least competitive in admissions and spend less than half the money and employ less than half the faculty per student as more selective schools. Though Black, Latino and Native American students have grown to 37% of the total postsecondary student body, they hold only 21% of the seats in roughly the 500 most selective schools. White and Asian American students, by contrast, still constitute nearly three-fourths of all those attending the most selective institutions, the Georgetown center found, far beyond their three-in-five share of the total postsecondary student population. While about four-fifths of students at the selective colleges finish their degrees, that's true for less than half of those at the open-access institutions. 'Open-access institutions educate the vast majority of college students, but, unfortunately, do so with the fewest resources and have the lowest success rates,' the Georgetown Center concluded in its 2024 report. 'The American postsecondary system, in other words, tends to provide the highest-quality education to those who need it least: students who are primarily wealthier than the median and who attended well-resourced high schools that smooth the transition into the most-selective colleges.' This pipeline of educational inequality ultimately terminates in widely unequal outcomes in the job market. The average hourly wages of Black and Latino workers remain about 11% lower than the wages for White workers — a wider gap than in 1979 for both minority groups, according to an analysis of federal data by the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank. Ben Zipperer, an EPI senior economist, has calculated that although Whites make up about 58% of all workers, they represent 68% of those whose wages put them in the top fifth of highest earners. Black and Latino workers, though nearly one-third of all workers, are just a little more than one-sixth of those at the top, wage-wise. Nelson of the LDF points to other measures of enduring inequality. Across the 100 largest companies listed on the S&P stock index, Black, Latino and Asian Americans hold less than one-fourth of upper management jobs, according to a Harvard Law School analysis. 'Black and Latinx people,' she added, 'make up fewer than 1% and 2% of Venture Capital entrepreneurs, respectively, according to a Harvard Business School analysis.' Despite some gains, women remain significantly underrepresented on both fronts, too, she noted. Though women obtain about 60% of all four-year undergraduate degrees and nearly two-thirds of all post-graduate degrees, the Harvard Law analysis found they hold only slightly more than one in four of those upper management jobs in large companies, little more than racial minorities. Less precisely quantifiable, but potentially just as important, these educational inequities also yield enduring racial disparities in what could be called the C-suite of American life —the positions that wield decision-making power in our major public and private institutions. Zack Mabel, director of research at the Georgetown Center, notes that the elite universities where Black and Latino students remain systematically underrepresented have long functioned as the conveyor belt producing most of the people who occupy those roles. 'There's so much concentrated power in decision making that grows up out of these selective institutions and as a society I would argue we are in desperate need of diversifying access to those bastions of power,' Mabel said. 'The only realistic way we are going to do that is by diversifying our selective institutions.' Despite these entrenched disparities, polls for years have shown that most Americans, including many racial minorities, express opposition to 'affirmative action' or diversity programs that explicitly elevate racial considerations above ostensibly neutral concepts of merit in employment or college admissions. And after a campaign in which Trump relentlessly attacked diversity efforts, his election day gains compared to 2020 among Latinos, Asian Americans and Black men, demonstrated at the least that his hostility to such programs was not a deal-breaker for many non-White voters. Daniel Cox, director of the Survey Center on American Life at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said Trump's gains with non-White voters didn't surprise him. Trump's improvement on that front showed that the argument over diversity programs 'is part of the elite discourse that working- and lower-middle-class families of color typically aren't that bought into,' Cox said. 'Your average working-class kid, the idea of going to Harvard is like the idea of going to the moon. It's a long shot; that's not the thing that is going to be life-changing or game-changing for them. Better opportunities where they live, cheaper housing where they live, lower crime — those are the things that are going to be game-changing for them.' Manuel Pastor, director of the Equity Research Institute at USC, agreed that Trump's gains with minority voters came in part because diversity programs in education and employment don't 'always reach working-class people of color in real, concrete material ways.' And Pastor believes that the backlash against diversity programs intensified because too many morphed into formulaic workplace trainings that 'became often more symbolic and about discourse and how about how people feel than they were about recognizing historic disparities and giving people a leg up into the workplace.' But, Pastor argues, none of that erases the core demographic reality that the US will increasingly rely for its future workers on kids of color who are on the wrong end of compounding disparities in educational and employment opportunity. Abandoning diversity programs now, he argues, 'means wasted talent. It means lost Einsteins. It means not investing in the productivity that we need for the future.' Like other critics of diversity programs, Butcher, the Heritage Foundation senior fellow, argues that trying to channel more minority students into elite educational institutions 'is a dangerous policy to engineer from the top. I think there is no centralized control or bureaucracy that could effectively engineer those kinds of outcomes without serious unintended consequences.' Even if the rollback of diversity programs widens the gap between White and non-White young people, Butcher said, 'I don't believe that just because there would be different outcomes for individuals based on race that it necessarily represents racism.' Amid the furious counteroffensive against diversity programs from conservatives wielding such arguments, defenders of these efforts are likely to shift their arguments over time more from equity to economic grounds. One of the defining demographic realities of modern America is the enormous racial divergence between America's youngest and oldest generations, a dynamic Frey has called the 'cultural generation gap' and I've described as the contrast between 'the brown and the gray.' Even as minorities have grown into a majority of the youth population, and advance toward becoming most of the working-age population, about three-fourths of seniors remain White (primarily because the US virtually shut off immigration from 1924 to 1965). This racial transformation has been occurring even as the number of seniors, as Frey has documented, has been growing more than nine times as fast as the working-age population. That means, to pay the payroll taxes that fund Social Security and Medicare, a rapidly growing population of White seniors will depend on a workforce that is increasing only modestly in numbers but rapidly becoming more diverse. That creates a shared interest across racial and generational lines that is rarely discussed in American politics. If kids of color continue to face the educational disparities evident today, the danger isn't just that the economy overall will face shortages of skilled workers as those kids become a larger share of the future workforce. Ultimately, the mostly White senior population also needs more kids of color to ascend into well-paying jobs where they can be taxed to meet the growing cost of the big federal programs for the elderly. Ending diversity programs now increases the risk that the US will fail to produce as many skilled minority workers as it needs on both fronts, advocates argue. 'The people we overlook for investments is going to shipwreck the future for America writ large, but especially for a whiter, older retired population that is counting on this (diverse) younger population to contribute' to their retirement costs, Pastor said. Frey said that sooner or later, the US will recognize that it must open more educational and employment opportunities for non-White young people because there simply will not be enough White kids available to fill all the skilled jobs the economy will demand. 'To talk about getting rid of DEI is just being blind to demography,' Frey says. 'Sooner or later, we are going to run out of (White) people even in those top jobs.' In the meantime, though, the politics of diversity are now moving in the opposite direction of the demographic and economic imperatives of an irreversibly diversifying nation.
CNN
14-02-2025
- Politics
- CNN
The real obstacle for Trump's campaign against DEI isn't Democrats. It's demography
The escalating drive from President Donald Trump and other Republicans against programs to promote greater diversity in education and employment is on a collision course with fundamental changes in the nation's demographic make-up, particularly among the young. Conservative opponents of diversity initiatives have clearly seized the momentum in the policy debate. In 2023, the six Republican-appointed Supreme Court Justices joined in a decisive ruling to virtually eliminate the consideration of race of college admissions. Since taking office, Trump has followed with a flurry of executive orders to end 'diversity, equity and inclusion' programs within the federal government and to penalize private employers that utilize them — even to the point of potentially seeking criminal prosecutions. Facing this pressure, prominent companies in recent months have publicly renounced efforts to increase diversity in hiring or contracting. Democrats have been tentative and divided over how hard to push back against the conservative drive to eradicate the so-called DEI programs. But this diversity counteroffensive is advancing precisely as kids of color have become a solid majority of the nation's youth. Since the start of the 21st century, young Whites have been rapidly declining not only as a share of the overall youth population, but also in their absolute numbers — to an extent possibly unprecedented in American history. This tectonic reshaping of the American population means that demography, not Democrats, will likely emerge as the biggest obstacle to Trump's campaign to uproot DEI programs across US society. Democratic Senator Cory Booker tells Dana Bash the Trump administration is trying to distract the American people while "making us less safe, making government more corrupt and violating people's privacy." These demographic trends ensure that in the years ahead, the nation will increasingly rely on non-White young people as an increasing portion of its students, workers and taxpayers. Yet today, minority young people remain tremendously underrepresented at the most exclusive colleges and universities and in high-level, well-paying jobs across the private sector. Abandoning diversity programs even as the nation continues to grow more diverse could expose US society to two distinct risks. One is that as minorities make up a growing share of the future workforce, failing to equip more of them with advanced academic and technical skills could leave the nation short of the highly trained workers it will need as it transitions further into the information-age economy. 'The future of the nation's labor force productivity and economic well-being will rely heavily on the success and integration of today's and tomorrow's increasingly multiracial younger population,' William Frey, a demographer at the center-left Brookings Metro think tank, wrote recently. The other big risk is that under current trends the US could harden into a more overtly two-tier society, with a widening gap between the growing overall presence of minorities in the population and their limited representation in the most prestigious educational and employment opportunities. That could be a formula for even more social turbulence and alienation than the US has already experienced around current racial disparities. The pushback against diversity programs 'is an attempt to entrench racial discrimination and disparities at every level of society and to horde power and influence among what will soon be a minority population of White people and the wealthy,' said Janai Nelson, president and director-counsel of the Legal Defense Fund, a leading civil rights organization. 'Relegating … marginalized groups to second-class citizenship will upend the American experiment of multiracial democracy and reinstate a caste system — and that is the point. Indeed, if unchecked, these efforts will create levels of disenfranchisement and disillusionment yet unseen in our modern history,' Nelson said. Opponents of diversity programs argue there's no reason for concern even if White people hold on to most of the prestigious educational and employment opportunities as their overall numbers shrink. 'I think we need to get away from being concerned about the skin color of those who are occupying those positions,' said Jonathan Butcher, a senior fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation. 'I think we need to move to a point where we are concerned about what the individuals accomplish once they are there.' But civil rights advocates argue Trump and his allies are brewing a recipe for both social and economic strain by hobbling efforts to expand opportunities for minorities exactly as they represent more of the nation's future workforce. To these critics, the drive by Trump and his Republican allies to dismantle diversity programs at this transitional moment amounts to raising the castle walls of privilege against a rising tide of demographic change. 'If institutional gatekeepers don't ensure equal access to opportunity, this country will become even more dangerously stratified by race and future generations of Americans will be wholly incapable of meeting the challenges of an increasingly global landscape,' said Nelson. 'This is a recipe for disaster.' In this century, the change in the demographic composition of America's youth population has been swift and sustained. Kids of color increased their share of the nation's total under-18 population from 39.1% in 2000 to 51.6% in 2023, according to an analysis of Census Bureau data provided to CNN by Frey. This change has been broadly felt. Over that period, the minority share of the youth population has increased in all 50 states, according to Frey's calculations. In 18 states, kids of color already constitute more than half of the youth population. In six other states, minority kids make up at least 46% of the youth population, suggesting they will become the majority group before long. The change in the absolute numbers of the youth population may be even more revealing than these shifts in its proportions. Since 2000, the number of non-White kids has increased by just over 9.3 million, Frey found. Over that same period, the number of White kids has declined by nearly 8.8 million. In 47 of the 50 states, not only has the share of Whites younger than 18 declined since 2000, but so has their absolute number. The only states that have more White kids today than at the turn of the 21st century are Utah, Idaho and South Carolina — and even they have seen only small increases, totaling about 120,000 between them. By contrast, 30 states have at least 75,000 fewer White kids today than they did in 2000. Frey has calculated from Census data that the number of White kids shrank from 2000 to 2010 and from 2010 to 2020, and continued to fall from 2020 to 2023. He says there is likely no precedent in American history for such an extended decline in the number of White young people. Something similar may have happened 'during the Great Depression for a few years,' Frey told me. 'That's possible. But for most of our history as a country we've been growing. It's fair to say that this is the first time we've seen a decline like this for this length of time.' Nor does Frey see much possibility that the decline in both the share and absolute number of White kids will reverse any time soon. 'I don't see this decline reversing, because the White population is older and women in their child-bearing ages are getting to be a smaller share of that group,' Frey told me. Immigration, he adds, isn't likely to add many more White kids since most legal migrants, come from predominantly non-White countries. The Census projects the minority share of the youth population will reach 53% by 2030 and 60% by 2050. All of this guarantees that non-White kids will represent the principal source of workers for the 21st-century economy. As recently as 2000, White kids still represented nearly 70% of all high school graduates, according to the federal National Center for Education Statistics. But in the 2021-22 school year, young White people, for the first time, fell below the majority of high school graduates (at 49.4%), and their share has continued to tumble: The National Center projects that Whites will slip to 46% of all high school graduates next June and to as little as 43% of the graduating class in 2031. The NCES projects that 300,000 fewer White kids will graduate high school this year than in 2008. Enrollment in postsecondary education is moving along the same track. The Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce reported in a study last year that the number of White students attending colleges and universities plummeted by 375,000 from 2009 to 2019, the latest year for which they calculated detailed figures by race; the number of Black students tumbled by nearly 100,000 as well. All the growth in postsecondary attendance over that period came from Latino students (up about 190,000) and, to a much lesser, extent Asian Americans (up nearly 20,000). Yet kids of color continue to face systemic inequities at each stage of the journey from education into the workforce. Research, for instance, has consistently shown that student performance lags in elementary and secondary schools where poverty is pervasive; today, about three-fourths of Black and Latino students, compared to only about one-third of their Asian American and White counterparts, attend schools where at least half of students qualify as poor under federal definitions, according to the National Equity Atlas published by PolicyLink, a research and advocacy group, and the Equity Research Institute at the University of Southern California. Higher education likewise remains substantially stratified by race. About two-thirds of both Black and Latino students, Georgetown found, attend so-called open-access colleges, which are the least competitive in admissions and spend less than half the money and employ less than half the faculty per student as more selective schools. Though Black, Latino and Native American students have grown to 37% of the total postsecondary student body, they hold only 21% of the seats in roughly the 500 most selective schools. White and Asian American students, by contrast, still constitute nearly three-fourths of all those attending the most selective institutions, the Georgetown center found, far beyond their three-in-five share of the total postsecondary student population. While about four-fifths of students at the selective colleges finish their degrees, that's true for less than half of those at the open-access institutions. 'Open-access institutions educate the vast majority of college students, but, unfortunately, do so with the fewest resources and have the lowest success rates,' the Georgetown Center concluded in its 2024 report. 'The American postsecondary system, in other words, tends to provide the highest-quality education to those who need it least: students who are primarily wealthier than the median and who attended well-resourced high schools that smooth the transition into the most-selective colleges.' This pipeline of educational inequality ultimately terminates in widely unequal outcomes in the job market. The average hourly wages of Black and Latino workers remain about 11% lower than the wages for White workers — a wider gap than in 1979 for both minority groups, according to an analysis of federal data by the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank. Ben Zipperer, an EPI senior economist, has calculated that although Whites make up about 58% of all workers, they represent 68% of those whose wages put them in the top fifth of highest earners. Black and Latino workers, though nearly one-third of all workers, are just a little more than one-sixth of those at the top, wage-wise. Nelson of the LDF points to other measures of enduring inequality. Across the 100 largest companies listed on the S&P stock index, Black, Latino and Asian Americans hold less than one-fourth of upper management jobs, according to a Harvard Law School analysis. 'Black and Latinx people,' she added, 'make up fewer than 1% and 2% of Venture Capital entrepreneurs, respectively, according to a Harvard Business School analysis.' Despite some gains, women remain significantly underrepresented on both fronts, too, she noted. Though women obtain about 60% of all four-year undergraduate degrees and nearly two-thirds of all post-graduate degrees, the Harvard Law analysis found they hold only slightly more than one in four of those upper management jobs in large companies, little more than racial minorities. Less precisely quantifiable, but potentially just as important, these educational inequities also yield enduring racial disparities in what could be called the C-suite of American life —the positions that wield decision-making power in our major public and private institutions. Zack Mabel, director of research at the Georgetown Center, notes that the elite universities where Black and Latino students remain systematically underrepresented have long functioned as the conveyor belt producing most of the people who occupy those roles. 'There's so much concentrated power in decision making that grows up out of these selective institutions and as a society I would argue we are in desperate need of diversifying access to those bastions of power,' Mabel said. 'The only realistic way we are going to do that is by diversifying our selective institutions.' Despite these entrenched disparities, polls for years have shown that most Americans, including many racial minorities, express opposition to 'affirmative action' or diversity programs that explicitly elevate racial considerations above ostensibly neutral concepts of merit in employment or college admissions. And after a campaign in which Trump relentlessly attacked diversity efforts, his election day gains compared to 2020 among Latinos, Asian Americans and Black men, demonstrated at the least that his hostility to such programs was not a deal-breaker for many non-White voters. Daniel Cox, director of the Survey Center on American Life at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said Trump's gains with non-White voters didn't surprise him. Trump's improvement on that front showed that the argument over diversity programs 'is part of the elite discourse that working- and lower-middle-class families of color typically aren't that bought into,' Cox said. 'Your average working-class kid, the idea of going to Harvard is like the idea of going to the moon. It's a long shot; that's not the thing that is going to be life-changing or game-changing for them. Better opportunities where they live, cheaper housing where they live, lower crime — those are the things that are going to be game-changing for them.' Manuel Pastor, director of the Equity Research Institute at USC, agreed that Trump's gains with minority voters came in part because diversity programs in education and employment don't 'always reach working-class people of color in real, concrete material ways.' And Pastor believes that the backlash against diversity programs intensified because too many morphed into formulaic workplace trainings that 'became often more symbolic and about discourse and how about how people feel than they were about recognizing historic disparities and giving people a leg up into the workplace.' But, Pastor argues, none of that erases the core demographic reality that the US will increasingly rely for its future workers on kids of color who are on the wrong end of compounding disparities in educational and employment opportunity. Abandoning diversity programs now, he argues, 'means wasted talent. It means lost Einsteins. It means not investing in the productivity that we need for the future.' Like other critics of diversity programs, Butcher, the Heritage Foundation senior fellow, argues that trying to channel more minority students into elite educational institutions 'is a dangerous policy to engineer from the top. I think there is no centralized control or bureaucracy that could effectively engineer those kinds of outcomes without serious unintended consequences.' Even if the rollback of diversity programs widens the gap between White and non-White young people, Butcher said, 'I don't believe that just because there would be different outcomes for individuals based on race that it necessarily represents racism.' Amid the furious counteroffensive against diversity programs from conservatives wielding such arguments, defenders of these efforts are likely to shift their arguments over time more from equity to economic grounds. One of the defining demographic realities of modern America is the enormous racial divergence between America's youngest and oldest generations, a dynamic Frey has called the 'cultural generation gap' and I've described as the contrast between 'the brown and the gray.' Even as minorities have grown into a majority of the youth population, and advance toward becoming most of the working-age population, about three-fourths of seniors remain White (primarily because the US virtually shut off immigration from 1924 to 1965). This racial transformation has been occurring even as the number of seniors, as Frey has documented, has been growing more than nine times as fast as the working-age population. That means, to pay the payroll taxes that fund Social Security and Medicare, a rapidly growing population of White seniors will depend on a workforce that is increasing only modestly in numbers but rapidly becoming more diverse. That creates a shared interest across racial and generational lines that is rarely discussed in American politics. If kids of color continue to face the educational disparities evident today, the danger isn't just that the economy overall will face shortages of skilled workers as those kids become a larger share of the future workforce. Ultimately, the mostly White senior population also needs more kids of color to ascend into well-paying jobs where they can be taxed to meet the growing cost of the big federal programs for the elderly. Ending diversity programs now increases the risk that the US will fail to produce as many skilled minority workers as it needs on both fronts, advocates argue. 'The people we overlook for investments is going to shipwreck the future for America writ large, but especially for a whiter, older retired population that is counting on this (diverse) younger population to contribute' to their retirement costs, Pastor said. Frey said that sooner or later, the US will recognize that it must open more educational and employment opportunities for non-White young people because there simply will not be enough White kids available to fill all the skilled jobs the economy will demand. 'To talk about getting rid of DEI is just being blind to demography,' Frey says. 'Sooner or later, we are going to run out of (White) people even in those top jobs.' In the meantime, though, the politics of diversity are now moving in the opposite direction of the demographic and economic imperatives of an irreversibly diversifying nation.
