From Middle School to Middle Adulthood: Education and the Social Mobility of the Immigrant Second Generation in an Age of Inequality

• In Event: 44.013 - The Wallace Foundation Distinguished Lecture: Rubén G. Rumbaut

Abstract

Abstract
The “new immigration” has coincided with an era of widening inequality, diminishing opportunity and growing gaps in the educational attainments of children raised in rich vs. poor families. Immigrants and their children today comprise a quarter of the U.S. population, transforming its ethnic diversity. Both the most educated and the least educated groups in the U.S. today are immigrants; what happens to their offspring remains a puzzle for educational research. The lecture will trace the story of the education and social mobility of a unique panel of 1.5- and second-generation respondents followed from 1991 (when they were in middle school at mean age 14) to 2015 (in their late 30s). The sample is representative of children of immigrants and refugees from Mexico, the Philippines, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, China and elsewhere in Asia and Latin America who had settled in San Diego prior to the baseline survey.

Author

• Rubén G. Rumbaut, University of California - Irvine