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. 2018 Jun;55(3):1033-1068.
doi: 10.1007/s13524-018-0666-7.

Growing Wealth Gaps in Education

Fabian T Pfeffer  1
Affiliations

Growing Wealth Gaps in Education

Fabian T Pfeffer. Demography. 2018 Jun.

Abstract

Prior research on trends in educational inequality has focused chiefly on changing gaps in educational attainment by family income or parental occupation. In contrast, this contribution provides the first assessment of trends in educational attainment by family wealth and suggests that we should be at least as concerned about growing wealth gaps in education. Despite overall growth in educational attainment and some signs of decreasing wealth gaps in high school attainment and college access, I find a large and rapidly increasing wealth gap in college attainment between cohorts born in the 1970s and 1980s, respectively. This growing wealth gap in higher educational attainment co-occurred with a rise in inequality in children's wealth backgrounds, although the analyses also suggest that the latter does not fully account for the former. Nevertheless, the results reported here raise concerns about the distribution of educational opportunity among today's children who grow up in a context of particularly extreme wealth inequality.

Keywords: Cohort change; Education; Inequality; Wealth.

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Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Educational rates by wealth background: Wealth measured as net worth (panel a) and home values (panel b)
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
Cohort trends in wealth gaps in education. *Display of lower bound of one confidence interval (second quintile, college degree given college attendance) truncated to maintain the same y-axis scale across outcomes
Fig. 3
Fig. 3
Cohort trends in controlled wealth gaps in education. Based on models including all control variables listed in Table 1, fully interacted by cohort. *Display of lower bound of one confidence interval (second quintile, college degree given college attendance) truncated to maintain the same y-axis scale across outcomes
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