"Doctor, Why Does My Head Hurt?"

"Doctor, Why Does My Head Hurt?"

"I keep banging my head against the wall to stop my headache. Should I keep doing this to cure my headache?" That's the only line that makes sense when I read an article like this from October 9, 2008 Inside Higher Education:

The latest generation of adults in the United States may be the first since World War II, and possibly before that, not to attain higher levels of education than the previous generations. While white and Asian American young people are outpacing previous generations, the gaps for other minority groups are large enough that the current generation is, on average, heading toward being less educated than its predecessor.

The article goes on to discuss how the current generation of blacks and Hispanics--who have been given enormous assistance through affirmative action admissions programs and scholarships--are actually less likely to complete college than the previous generation. Asians, of course, are now well ahead of whites, and women are ahead of men. But:

For black and Latino women, for example, the most recent generation outperformed the prior ones, but the opposite is true for men. And across racial and ethnic groups, women are achieving a higher level of education than men.

So this horribly racist system is discriminating against black and Hispanic men--but not against black and Hispanic women?

Wouldn’t it be more useful to ask why black men are doing so much worse as the society has bent the 14th Amendment into a pretzel to justify racial discrimination in favor of blacks? If whites were at the top of stack on this, the “institutional racism” argument might be worthy of examination. But pretty clearly, the only way “institutional racism” is much of an argument is if these institutions dominated by liberals hate blacks (and only black men, at that), and love Asians more than whites.
Maybe we should start looking at the cultural factors involved. Is there anything more obviously true than that cultural values about education influence how much education kids get?