A new report from the U.S. Census Bureau shows the percentage of African American with bachelor’s degrees in specific fields who are unemployed. Overall, the percentage of African Americans with a bachelor’s degree who were unemployed in 2012 was 6.0 percent, compared to an unemployment rate of 3.5 percent for college-educated Whites.
But for Blacks with bachelor’s degree in some fields, the unemployment rate was significantly higher than the national average. For example, Blacks who graduated from a four-year college with a degree in the physical sciences had an unemployment rate of 7.1 percent. The unemployment rate for Blacks with bachelor’s degrees in communication, literature and languages, or visual and performing arts was also 7 percent or more. Even Blacks with bachelor’s degrees in computer science had a higher unemployment rate than college-educated African Americans generally.
Disciplines where college-education African Americans had unemployment rates lower than the national average for all African Americans with bachelor’s degrees included biological sciences, science and engineering, and education.
