Source: Chetty.
Chart: Percentage of Children Earning More than their Parents
Children born in 1945 had a 90% chance of earning more than their parents. But only 50% of the children born in 1985 will earn more than their parents.
Tag: class mobility
College as the US Class Mobility Stiffler
Higher education is not the class leveler American like to believe it is.
The post-war US built an excellent multi-tiered higher educational system that offered clear pathways for class mobility to the baby boom generation. But this class mobility escalator has stalled, leaving children of working class families still working class, only now they are saddled with crushing higher educational debt.
Graduation Rates
First, class predicts graduation rates.
Source: NYT 03/26/18.
College Graduate Marriage Rates
Second, marriage rates of college graduates – a prime vehicle for protecting and amplifying class standing — are differentially adverse to working class college graduates of the same elite schools. Quoting from a Times article:
Marriage rates for young adults just out of college are low across the board. But as people get into their 30s, trends diverge. For example, more than half of Princeton students born into upper-income households in the early 1980s — roughly, the classes of 2002 through 2006 — were married by 2014. They didn’t all marry other Princetonians, of course, but it’s common.
But for Princeton alumni from the lowest-income households — the bottom one-fifth compared with the top one-fifth — the trends are different. Only a third were married by 2014. This pattern holds for other elite colleges and universities. For people born over the five years from 1980 to 1984, the marriage rate for upper-income students who attended Ivy League institutions was 14 percentage points higher than the rate for lower-income students.
See Also
See also this prior blog post on elite education’s stifling of class mobility
Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu referred to education as social capital that can be translated into economic capital. We see it at work here.
Higher education is not the class leveler that Americans like to believe it is.
Chart: Sports Channel Viewership by Age and Income
Source: WSJ 2/20/2018.
Chart: Perpetuation of American Class System
Little know and even less discussed is that, contrary to one of our nation’s founding myths, transgenerational economic class mobility is lower in the US than it is in several European “socialist” countries.
Higher education for our increasingly knowledge-based economy is the primary means of intergenerational economic mobility, but access to elite education and the funding of quality public schools is all getting worse for children of the American working class.
