Educational Attainment and Income Mobility Across Three Generations

• In Event: Social Mobility

Abstract

Beginning with work by Hout (1984), scholars have often assessed whether schooling is a “great equalizer” (GE) of socioeconomic mobility outcomes by comparing the associations between parents’ and children’s incomes within levels of children’s highest level of schooling completed. In this study, we use three-generation data linking grandparents, parents, and grandchildren from the PSID-SHELF to build on the (GE) literature in three ways. First, we assess correlations between grandparents’ and grandchildren’s incomes within levels of grandchildren’s completed schooling – extending the literature from a two- to a three-generation mobility focus, while also presenting results that compare two-and three-generation mobility and assess three-generation mobility net of two-generation mobility. Second, we conceptualize and measure mobility both with associations summarized by a single coefficient, as is typical in the GE literature, as well as the direction of mobility (upward, downward, stable) and transitions between locations in the income distribution, as is now common in the broader socioeconomic mobility literature. Third, we investigate whether and how these patterns differ by race, which to date the GE literature has not considered.

Authors

• Jordan Conwell, University of Texas-Austin

• Katarina Huss, University of Texas-Austin