NPR covered this last year.
Crandolph writes:
> That’d be 120,000 out of around 28,000,000 people. Not great odds.
It’s even smaller odds for being a professional athlete. Yes, there might be as few as 120,000 blacks in standard upper-middle-class careers like doctors and lawyers among late twenties to mid-sixties American blacks (which would be more like 15,000,000, since we’re not counting those over retirement age or under college age). But there are certainly no more than 27,000 blacks who professional athletes or retired professional athletes less than the usual retirement age among those 15,000,000 people. And I think that I’ve been conservative on both figures. I think that there are actually more than 120,000 blacks in upper-middle-class professions and less than 27,000 blacks who are professional athletes or retired professional athletes who are less than the usual retirement age.
It depends on what advice we’re giving. I was replying to the sort of thing an average black teenager might say when contemplating careers. If he or she said, “Hey, I’ve got virtually no chance of making it as a doctor or a lawyer or something like that, while I’ve got a much bigger chance of making it as a professional athlete.” My reply would be “No, you’ve got a fairly small chance of making it as a professional athlete. Your chance of making it as a doctor or a lawyer or something like that, while it may not be very good, is certainly better your chance of making it as a professional athlete.” In addition, one could argue that a person who tries to become a doctor or a lawyer and fails is in better position than someone who tries and fails to become a professional athlete. Someone who doesn’t make quite good enough grades in college to get into med school will still be a good high school science teacher. Someone who fails to make it as an athlete in college often flunks out of college and has sports injuries and steroid abuse to deal with.
I should think that the access to college that sports scholarships provide open far more doors than they close.
The crappy primary education and family experience with formal education of poorer Americans of any ethnic background leaves most of them (and I was one myself) with much better odds of getting a foot on the rung of the pro sports ladder than the white collar professional ladder.
While one’s odds of getting into the NBA draft are low, if your family struggled with literacy or if there’s no scholarship tradtion in your household, if your schools have little or no real science programs, if no one in your family knows how to go about the financial aid process, etc., then your odds of making it into med school are near zero. There are reasons why we have 1/3 the Afr-Amer doctors and lawyers one would otherwise expect.
I’m sure if you examine who the black lawyers and doctors are, you’ll probably find most of them come from middle class backgrounds themselves, which is still a minority of African Americans. For the majority, unfortunately, our society is more likely to reward sports skills than provide a decent educational opportunity.
I came from a family where my parents didn’t go beyond high school and my grandparents didn’t go beyond grade school. My high school, although it was rural and entirely white, was as unfriendly to academic achievement as the average mostly black inner city high school (and the students came from families that were only a little better off on average than the students in mostly black inner city high schools). I suspect that in the 55-year history of the school, with about 75 graduates a year, only a couple dozen or so of the graduates have gone on to get the sorts of jobs that are normally thought of as upper-middle-class careers, requiring a graduate or professional degree.
When I told people there that I wanted to go to some highly selective college and maybe go on to do a Ph.D., they made it clear that I was a snob and a traitor. Had I wanted to be a professional athlete, they would have thought that was great. There was a lot of emphasis on sports at my high school. They were a lot more enthusiastic about sports than about learning anything in classes. This was not because people there had a big chance of becoming a professional athlete. Although one or two people got athletic scholarships to college every year, no one from my high school has ever become a professional athlete.
I think the same thing is true at mostly black inner city high schools where the students all come from working-class or downright poor families. Out of the 500 (let’s say) students who graduate from such a high school per year, while half a dozen to a dozen of the graduates may get a college athletic scholarship, probably half of them flunk out of college and maybe one person from that high school every five years will eventually become a professional athlete. In contrast, of those 2,500 graduates over five years, maybe five or ten will have the drive to go on to have upper-middle-class careers, despite the terrible academic state of the high school. Even if you went to a worthless high school, you still have a better chance to make it to an upper-middle-class profession than to become a professional high school.
I know from my high school that the real trick is to not listen to the people at your high school who tell you that sports are everything and academics are nothing. The problem is not that colleges won’t give students from lousy high schools a chance. Many selective colleges are willing to overlook deficiencies in the educational preparation of intelligent students who went to lousy high schools. A smart high school graduate will, in any case, be able to get into some second-rate state university and with hard work make it to a graduate or professional degree and into an upper-middle-class career.
If I were to talk to someone who was just about to graduate from a lousy high school, whether it was a mostly black inner city high school or a mostly white rural high school like mine, and this person was fairly smart and fairly good at sports, I would tell them, “Forget about sports. You have virtually no chance to make it as a professional athlete. Your chances of making it to some upper-middle-class career, while not very good, are certainly better than your chances of making it as a professional athlete. Even if you don’t make it to such a career, your education will give you a pretty good chance at a middle-class career like being a high school teacher.” The problem is not forcing your way through the lousy educational system. That’s hard, but it can be done. The problem is getting yourself past the attitude that tells you that sports are wonderful and academics are worthless. Sports are a trap for most working-class kids who think that it’s their way to make to middle-class life.