Month In Review

Education
August,1996

Access To Education Aids Income Mobility

Parents' educational background doesn't have much to do with whether Americans attend college, according to studies by the Department of Education during the 1980s and 1990s.

• Almost 40 percent of the children of high school graduates receive a degree from a two-year or four-year college within 10 years of leaving high school.

• Surprisingly, more than 50 percent of the children of college graduates don't receive a bachelor's degree.

• As a result, the child of a college graduate will, on average, have only 1.5 years more education than the child of a high school graduate.

By the third generation, differences in the first generation's level of education disappear -- about the same rate at which initial differences in income are equalized. Historically, differences in literacy rates between mostly literate immigrants to the United States from England and Scandinavia and the much less literate Italian and Portuguese had mostly disappeared by the third generation, according to economist George Borjas of Harvard University.

While there is evidence that more lower-income students are obtaining at least some higher education, a high percentage of children of college-educated parents don't.

• About 45 percent of low-income high school graduates now enroll in higher education after graduation, up from only 32 percent in the early 1980s.

• On the other hand, a survey of students entering college in the 1989-1990 school year found that only 41 percent of those with college-educated parents had received a bachelor's degree after five years.

• About 24 percent of them had no degree and were no longer enrolled, while the others were either still enrolled or had a two-year degree.

The returns to education in the form of income are well documented. For instance, workers gain 4 percent to 6 percent in income for every year of college, even if they never graduate. Thus educational mobility is linked to income mobility.

Source: Michael J. Mandel, "The Great Equalizer," Business Week, July 22, 1996.