{"id":57302,"date":"2013-10-12T12:00:51","date_gmt":"2013-10-12T17:00:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=57302"},"modified":"2013-12-04T22:30:10","modified_gmt":"2013-12-05T03:30:10","slug":"economic-mobility-and-education-in-the-u-s-today","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2013\/10\/12\/economic-mobility-and-education-in-the-u-s-today\/","title":{"rendered":"Economic Mobility and Education in the U.S. Today"},"content":{"rendered":"

The phrase “economic mobility” refers to the likelihood that a child will end up in the same or a different economic strata than their parent. \u00a0Education is usually cited as a key to improving economic well-being intergenerationally. Conversely, but often unstated, is the idea that if a child of college graduates doesn’t attend college, than they should perhaps do worse<\/em> than their parents.<\/p>\n

What does the data say?<\/p>\n

The figure below is from the Pew Economic Mobility Project<\/a>. \u00a0Along the horizontal axis is the parent’s household income quintile: economic strata broken up into fifths from the lowest (left) to highest (right). \u00a0The bars represent the adult child’s income for those who didn’t graduate from college (red) and those that did (blue).<\/p>\n

\"1\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Often we focus on the left side. \u00a0Does attending college help poor and working class Americans? \u00a0The answer is yes. Only 10% of children born into the bottom 20% of household incomes will grow up and stay in the bottom 20%, compared to almost half of people who don’t go to college. \u00a0 \u00a0It’s similar, if less stark, for those in the 2nd to bottom quintile.<\/p>\n

But what about the rich kids? \u00a0I want to look at the right side. \u00a0Notice that a quarter of kids born into the top quintile stay there even if they don’t get a college degree. \u00a0Half of non-degree earning children will stay in the top 40% of income earners.<\/p>\n

Among the richest kids who do go to college, about 50% will remain in the top quintile. \u00a0There are lots of reasons for this, but one is paternal connections. \u00a0One\u00a0study<\/a>\u00a0found that a whopping 70% of sons of the 1% had worked for the same employer as their father. \u00a0I wonder how high that number would be if we added daddy’s friends?<\/p>\n

In sum,\u00a0it’s hard to go up from down below, but it’s also relatively easy to stay sitting pretty if you’re already way up there.<\/p>\n

Via Matthew O’Brien at The Atlantic<\/a>. Cross-posted at Pacific Standard<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\nLisa Wade, PhD<\/a> is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of <\/em>American Hookup<\/a>, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender<\/a>; and a forthcoming introductory text: <\/em>Terrible Magnificent Sociology<\/a>.\u00a0You can follow her on Twitter<\/a> and Instagram<\/a>.<\/em><\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The phrase “economic mobility” refers to the likelihood that a child will end up in the same or a different economic strata than their parent. \u00a0Education is usually cited as a key to improving economic well-being intergenerationally. Conversely, but often unstated, is the idea that if a child of college graduates doesn’t attend college, than […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":57596,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[29,36,98,34,3920],"class_list":["post-57302","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-class","tag-economics","tag-capitalism","tag-education","tag-nation-united-states"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/files\/2013\/10\/Screenshot_111.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57302","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=57302"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57302\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":59717,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57302\/revisions\/59717"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/57596"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=57302"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=57302"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=57302"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}