Black workers are overrepresented across frontline industry jobs, including trucking and warehouse roles.
Occupational segregation steers Black workers into professions like transportation, in part because it pays relatively well for jobs that don’t require degrees, says Michael Collins, vice president of the Center for Racial Economic Equity at Jobs for the Future. But Collins recently wrote about how those jobs often lack sufficient protection from unsafe conditions or disruption because of AI or automation.
“Forty percent of all Black workers are in frontline roles,” he says. “How do they advance?”
Collins is part of a recently launched JFF project to support six community colleges as they seek to increase the success of Black students in accessing and completing programs that lead to high-wage jobs in growing industries. The goal is to take lessons learned from the three-year effort, which is backed by a $2.2M gift from the Truist Foundation, to help other colleges and different groups of students.
“This is bringing a population focus, a population lens,” says Andrea Juncos, a senior director for the JFF center. While the effort will begin with Black students and workers, she says the “interventions we develop aren’t exclusive to Black learners.”
By partnering with the colleges’ institutional research arms, the project will look for programs that enroll large shares of Black students. It will seek to learn how students picked their field of study, and will analyze where graduates are landing high-wage jobs in high-growth industries, such as healthcare, engineering, and advanced manufacturing. That means looking at which roles are really in-demand, and how far pay goes based on the local cost of living.
“How do we close the disparity, in both the enrollment and the end product?” asks Brianne McDonough, JFF’s director of career and learning pathways.
Strategies participating colleges could use to give a boost to education programs that lead to good careers might include improving student recruitment, embedding career advising and navigation, and creating more work-based learning opportunities. The project also will feature focus groups with students and faculty members.
For example, North Carolina’s Forsyth Technical Community College will focus on addressing the underrepresentation of Black men in nursing programs and Black women in mechatronics, both fields that can lead to high-demand, high-jobs, writes Janet Spriggs, the college’s president.
Spriggs cites the curb-cut effect, where a solution for one group can benefit others, as a guiding principle.
The pushback on DEI in many states has complicated the project.
“That has made this work very tricky,” says Collins. It’s hard to make progress on higher education’s contributions to occupational segregation without looking at race, he says. And the stakes are high.
“It’s creating an environment that in some ways puts our economy at risk, because we don’t want to look at the race variable,” Collins says.