Poverty is a Stubborn Thing
Although poverty is a widely known topic in America when it comes 3rd world countries, we are often times to busy in our own life’s to observe the impoverished people around us. Sometimes these people are our friends, family, and coworkers, but Americans lack the knowledge and statistics of poverty when it’s close to home, to help make a change.
More specifically we will look at the poverty statistics in Oklahoma. The number of people living in poverty is about 610,828 people and the population is only about 3,795,764 people, this means that a large percentage of the population is impoverished. If we break this number down further we will notice that we rank 38th overall in poverty, children impoverished we rank 35th, working-age women we rank 41st, and working-age men rank 34th in the nation, according to Talk Poverty.
When we break down the poverty by race in Oklahoma the highest impoverished demographic is African Americans with about 27.8% who are at the poverty level, next is Asian Americans with 17.2% who are living at the poverty level, Latinos are about 24.6% who are living at the poverty level, Native Americans have about 23.1% living at poverty level, and Caucasians have 13.3% living at the poverty level, according to Talk Poverty.
In Oklahoma HUD Rental Assistance used by families with children in 2015 was about 47,768 people. More than 600,000 people in Oklahoma depend on supplemental nutrition assistance program or SNAP, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. These are both good governmental assistance to help people who might not be able to help their selves.
One factor to poverty is education levels. In Oklahoma we have about an 82.7% High School graduation rate, which I believe is relatively high for how small the state is. Sometimes education can be a factor into reasons for poverty, but with a high graduation rate for high school, poverty most likely links more to the higher education gap. According to Georgetown Center for Education and the Workforce, states that by 2020, 67% of job vacancies in Oklahoma or 418,000 jobs will require a college degree or additional postsecondary education and training. In Oklahoma only about 18,698 of high school graduates enrolled in higher education courses in 2014-15, according to the Georgetown Center for Education. With the rate of students enrolling in higher education universities public institutions granted 35,903 degrees in 2014-15, these seems to be a low number if you consider how many universities are in Oklahoma alone.
The cost of higher education could be one factor for low enrollment in universities if we look at the cost for community colleges it is about $3,458 per semester; it cost $5,642 per semester for a regional university in Oklahoma, according to Georgetown Center for Education and the Workforce. With the cost of education so high it is hard for people who live in the middle class to work and finish degrees, financial aid is not offered to students who live at the middle class. This financial strain could be affecting poverty rates, within the middle class high school graduates, because they are unable to attend college universities.
With all of these statistics and new knowledge about the strain of higher education cost and high poverty rates I hope that it will bring about change to the higher education cost and together we will find a way to end poverty.
