A 2003 Study Found that Black College Grads Had the Same Job Callback Chances as White Convicted Felons—Has Anything Changed?

In 2003, sociologist Devah Pager sent a shockwave through the employment world with an audit study that revealed a brutal truth about American hiring practices. Setting out to discover the effects of having a criminal record on employment, she found something that made national news: Black men without a criminal background were called back for interviews at about the same rate as white men with felony convictions on their applications.

This wasn’t about criminal justice—it was about deeply embedded racial bias in hiring. Two decades later, has anything changed?

The answer, according to the latest research, is a resounding “No.”

Key Takeaways

• A groundbreaking 2003 study found that Black men without criminal records received job callbacks at about the same rate as white men with felony convictions.
• The original study’s findings still hold true today: Employers continue to use race as a proxy for assumptions about criminal history and job performance.

The Study That Exposed America’s Hiring Reality

Pager’s 2003 study aimed to investigate the employment consequences of incarceration—a straightforward question in criminal justice policy. Her research team sent out fictitious job applications in Milwaukee and compared callback rates for applicants with and without criminal records.

While Pager designed her study to measure how criminal records affect employment, it was a longstanding problem. “Formerly incarcerated people nationwide have an unemployment rate of 27%, which is comparable to what the U.S. experienced during the Great Depression,” Wanda Bertram, a communications strategist at the Prison Policy Initiative, told Investopedia.

But Pager inadvertently documented something more profound: that racial bias is so deeply embedded in hiring practices that a Black applicant’s race alone created the same employment barrier as a criminal record. The study became famous not for what it revealed about the impact of incarceration on hiring, but for what it exposed about racial discrimination more broadly.

“When you think about the immense economic disparity between black and white communities, it’s just clear that there are so many more forces at play than simply a criminal record-related stigma,” said David Pitts, vice president of the justice and safety division at the Urban Institute.

As hiring becomes increasingly automated—an estimated 98.4% of Fortune 500 companies now use some form of automation in their hiring process—studies are finding AI hiring systems are replicating the same biases, potentially making discrimination less visible and more difficult to challenge.

No Progress in 25 Years

The most comprehensive analysis of racial hiring discrimination ever conducted reveals a sobering truth: despite decades of civil rights legislation and changing social attitudes, the level of discrimination Black and Latino job seekers face has barely budged.

A landmark 2023 Northwestern University meta-analysis examined data from 90 field experiments conducted going back decades, analyzing more than 174,000 job applications across six Western countries. The findings are stark: white applicants received, on average, 36% more callbacks than Black applicants and 24% more callbacks than Latino applicants with otherwise identical resumes. Just as troubling: the study found that there has been “almost no change over time” in employment discrimination.

Recent survey data shows how this discrimination is experienced. About four in 10 Black workers (41%) say they have experienced discrimination or been treated unfairly by an employer in hiring, pay, or promotions because of their race or ethnicity, according to a 2023 Pew Research Center survey. This compares to lower shares of Asian (25%), Hispanic (20%), and white (8%) workers reporting similar experiences.

The discrimination doesn’t end once someone gets hired. The data shows continual and widespread wage disparities across racial groups. In addition, according to a 2025 Boston College research review, black workers remain more vulnerable throughout their careers, being “the first to be laid off from struggling firms” and facing “longer spells of unemployment” when they do lose jobs. During recessions, Black workers are more likely to be displaced than their white counterparts, creating a cycle where they must repeatedly navigate the same discriminatory hiring processes.

Allegations of racial discrimination are also rising. In 2024, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) received over 500,000 calls and 81,055 new charges, with racial discrimination charges increasing significantly over the previous year.

The Bottom Line

More than 20 years after Pager’s study, the fundamental problem persists. More recent research reveals that racial bias in hiring hasn’t changed, and the use of AI in hiring threatens to repeat discriminatory patterns in less visible ways.