Tressie McMillan Cottom, “Blanket ‘Don’t Go To Graduate School!’ Advice Ignores Race and Reality?”:

That’s not changed overly much. That’s why Obama’s reduction of the public sector as the private sector picked up hiring over the past three years has been devastating for black workers. We work in the public sector because equal opportunity hiring laws counteract biases in hiring that make a white felon more likely to be hired than a black applicant with no criminal history. We stay in bureaucracies because those same equal opportunity laws require that promotion criteria be explicit, published and uniformly applied regardless of sex, race, gender, etc. which counteracts the documented bias that transmutable, opaque “discretion” produces.

It’s interesting to note that people forget, when dealing with an institution, how it fits in the larger social structure, and graduate school may actually be a great idea for groups that are not the ones giving the advice.