the authors' calculations, the new school enrollment rates account for 39 percent of the increase in the black-white employment differential.
Military enlistment patterns have also changed. Since the early 1970s, black enlistment rates have topped white rates, reversing the historic pattern. Nearly 15 percent of 20-to-23-year-old black men, but just over five percent of their white peers, were in uniform in 1981.
Because military personnel were not until recently counted as part of the U.S. work...