Not all Italian-Americans have the opportunity to go to college. As Philip Lombardo stated above: a fair amount of Italians in the USA are probably still working class people. The Italian-American working class population is the largest in New York City and probably will remain for years to come. Wherever there's a more or less impoverished working class, there will be organized crime. It's only natural for some people to long for more wealth and power, wealth and power other opportunities will not give them. So until the Italian-American working class in NYC fully disappears or at the least shrink to a near-extinction level, the Five Families will be around.

And organized crime from the white working class isn't a solely Italian thing. The Italian-Americans are just known for the large organization called the 'American mafia', but the Irish also always had and still have their own gangs in the USA as well as back in Ireland. The British working class in the UK has traditionally also been an emergence pool for organized crime. And when you ask yourself the question "and how about the Dutch? The Germans? The Danish? The Anglo-Americans? The French Canadians?...", they all have their criminal organizations as well, mostly in the form of outlaw motorcycle gangs. You could argue that they don't carry the same cloud the mafia does, but there's no denying in the fact that there's an amount of bikers (especially in Europe and Canada, as well as Australia) that are as vicious and feared as any of the traditional 'mafia'-type groups, and in some cases just as organized.