Jordan Conwell, Assistant Professor, Sociology, University of Texas at Austin
https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/sociology/faculty/jac24892

Title: Educational Attainment and Wealth Mobility in the Student Debt Cohort


Abstract: The paper to be presented assesses intergenerational wealth mobility by level of completed schooling (less than high school, high school, associate’s degree, bachelor’s degree, or master’s degree or higher) using data from the 1997 Cohort of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY-97), with the oldest cohort members now followed up to age 40. This provides a test of the hypothesis that education is a “Great Equalizer” of economic mobility outcomes that is novel in three ways: I consider the outcome of wealth mobility, at times in comparison to the literature’s more commonly studied outcome of income mobility; consider both parent-child wealth correlations and the direction of positional wealth mobility transitions of one decile or more; and estimate pooled results and then test for potential heterogeneity between Blacks, Hispanics, and those who are neither Black nor Hispanic. After presenting results, I will discuss implications for the understanding of education’s potential meritocratic power its debt financing era, with an emphasis on current debates about the value of bachelor’s and graduate level higher education for contemporary cohorts.

Karl Vachuska, Graduate Student, Sociology, UW-Madison

Title: The effect of college attendance on mid-life cognitive outcomes: A causal decomposition approach using the High School and Beyond data

Abstact: This study investigates the potential role of baccalaureatecollege attendance in mitigating inequities in cognitive function in midlifethat are rooted in social origins. Using data from the High School and Beyondstudy, we apply Yu and Elwert’s (2023) framework to causally decomposecognitive outcomes between those who had at least one parent who obtained abaccalaureate degree and those who did not) into components attributable tosample members’ college attendance and components not attributable to theircollege attendance. Fundamentally, our analysis estimates how disparities inmidlife cognitive function would shift if college attendance was assignedindependent of social origin. We find that college attendance explainsapproximately 20% of the difference in average mid-life cognition of childrenwhose parents did and did not attend college—and almost entirely throughdifferential college attendance rates between the two groups rather than thedifference in the effects of attendance or the process of selection.