Dr. Katherine Magnuson
School of Social Work
UW-Madison

"Baby’s First Years: Testing the Impact of Poverty Reduction in Early Childhood"

Dr. Jordan Conwell
Sociology and Educational Policy Studies
UW-Madison

Race, Gender, Higher Education, and Socioeconomic Attainment: Evidence from Baby Boomers at Mid-Life

Drawing on intersectionality and life course theory, this study investigates relationships between race, gender, college attendance and quality, and income at mid-life. We use data on White, Black, and Hispanic men and women from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth-1979 Cohort (NLSY-79), which we merge with college competitiveness information from Barron’s Admissions Competitiveness Index. Net of family background and academic qualifications, we find net Black and Hispanic advantages in college attendance and college quality – particularly for Black women relative to White women. We also assess racial differences in economic returns to college attendance and college quality for cohort members’ average incomes from 2006-2014, when they were old enough for their measured incomes to proxy their permanent lifetime earnings. We find that the net advantages in college-going for students of color did not fully translate to the labor market. Net of background characteristics and labor market experiences, we find Black-White and Hispanic-White income gaps, to non-Whites’ disadvantage, among those who attended colleges of comparable quality, as well as among those who did not attend college – particularly among men. The study demonstrates the utility of taking an intersectional and life course approach to the study of higher education and the economic returns to schooling.