‘MRS Degrees’ for Whom? Racial Disparities in Women’s Household Economic Returns to College Quality

• In Event: Excellence in Education Research: Early Career Scholars and Their Work

Abstract

‘MRS Degrees’ for Whom? Racial Disparities in Women’s Household Economic Returns to College Quality

Prior research on economic returns to college quality often assesses returns in terms of individuals’ incomes. This approach overlooks the fact that college graduates often marry other college graduates who attended the same college or a college of comparable quality, pooling financial and other advantages within households. Such pooling may be especially important for college-going women, who receive lower individual income returns to college quality than men, consistent with research on gender inequality. In this study, we combine data from the National Longitudinal Study of Youth, 1979 Cohort (NLSY-79) and the Integrated Postsecondary Data System (IPEDS) to investigate women's household income returns to college quality, as well as their individual incomes as a share of their household incomes. We also assess the extent to which Black and White women receive equal household economic returns to college quality. We find that, spanning from community colleges to the nation’s most elite institutions, Black women receive lower household income returns to college quality and are responsible for larger shares of their households’ incomes than White women. Further, these racial differences increase as college quality increases. Racial differences in a set of characteristics of women, their children, and their partners account for household income gaps among community college attendees, but not among those who attended higher quality four-year colleges. The study demonstrates that investigating household, as opposed to individual, financial returns to higher education is an important vantage point for understanding its role in the socioeconomic life course.

Authors

• Jordan Conwell, The University of Texas at Austin

• Natasha Quadlin, University of California, Los Angeles

• Jia Wang