Underpaid and Over My Head in Debt: Latina/o and Black Millennials’ Labor Market Experiences

• In Event: 390 - Section on Race, Gender and Class Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 05. Race, Gender, and Class: Post Collegiate Experiences

Abstract

This study’s interest is to understand to what extent the American Dream is possible for young Americans. To that end, I examine how young college graduates are faring in the post-Great Recession economy. Members of this cohort, millennials, were born between 1981 and 1995. The respondents in this study graduated college in 2008 and most entered the labor market in the midst of the Great Recession, the most trying economic climate since the Great Depression. Studying college graduates is important because education, especially higher education, is widely understood as the “great equalizer” and even a guarantor of upward mobility (Downey, Hippel, and Broh 2004; Torche 2011). It also harkens to the foundational meritocratic story of the American Dream whereby aspirants need only work hard, earn a college degree, and thus achieve upward mobility. I compare respondents of the Beginning Postsecondary Longitudinal Study (BPS) who graduated college in 1993 and another cohort that graduated in 2008. I investigate how millennials are faring in the job market and how they vary by racial and ethnic group. Because women tend to perform worse in the labor market I am interested in how gender might continue to affect outcomes for college graduates (Blau and Kahn 1992; England 1995; England 2005). Black and Latina women are particularly disadvantaged in the labor market (Browne 2000; Browne and Misra 2003). This study will investigate how each of these groups is performing in the current labor market as well as how a previous cohort performed in the 1990s.

Author

• Charlene Cruz-Cerdas, University of Pennsylvania