Abstract
Income inequality and the achievement test score gap between high- and low-income children increased dramatically in the United States beginning in the 1970s. This article investigates the demographic (family income, mother’s education, family size, two-parent family structure, and age of mother at birth) underpinnings of the growing income-based gap in schooling using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. Across 31 cohorts, we find that increases in the income gap between high- and low-income children account for approximately three-quarters of the increasing gap in completed schooling, one-half of the gap in college attendance, and one-fifth of the gap in college graduation. We find no consistent evidence of increases in the estimated associations between parental income and children’s completed schooling. Increasing gaps in the two-parent family structures of high- and low-income families accounted for relatively little of the schooling gap because our estimates of the (regression-adjusted) associations between family structure and schooling were surprisingly small for much of our accounting period. On the other hand, increasing gaps in mother’s age at the time of birth accounts for a substantial portion of the increasing schooling gap: mother’s age is consistently predictive of children’s completed schooling, and the maternal age gap for children born into low- and high-income families increased considerably over the period.
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Notes
These data are reported in Duncan and Murnane (2011) and are from the U.S. Census Bureau, which started tracking annual family income in 1947.
Because the PSID switched to a biannual survey starting in 1997, for the even years 1998–2008, the year immediately previous or immediately following the year the respondent was aged 24 is used. Further, education values for heads and wives are not asked annually (as they are for other family members) because for adults, it does not change quickly or commonly; so in some cases, the most recent data available are also used. Periodically, the PSID updates head/wife education, but in many cases, earlier year education information is brought forward to the current-year survey.
It is tricky to think about timing issues. For one thing, our age 14–16 accounting period over which family income is measured was chosen for practical rather than conceptual reasons: it enabled us to gain as many PSID birth cohorts as possible for which both family income and children’s completed schooling were measured at sensible ages. If income before or after the age 14–16 window matters the most for children’s schooling, then our age 14–16 window may be providing an erroneous reading of the degree to which income inequality may be causing disparities in completed schooling. We explore whole-childhood results later.
The small (.060) standardized coefficient on two-parent family structure is surprising but results from other regression controls. Simple correlations between family structure and completed schooling are .200 for the entire period and .323 for the second half of the period (Table S2, Online Resource 1). Removing income from the regression presented in Table 1 increases the coefficient on two-parent structure from .287 to .620, which is still not large enough to matter much in our upcoming decomposition analysis.
We also estimated a piecewise linear relationship between income (and log income) and children’s completed schooling fit to the first and second half of the period, which allows for separate linear segments for each income quintile. There was some indication (p values between .05 and .10) of an increase in the importance of the lowest income quintile, but nothing close to a statistically significant change elsewhere in the income distribution.
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Acknowledgments
We thank Sean Reardon, Sara McLanahan, Rob Mare, and participants in seminars at Duke University; Harvard University; Stanford University; the University of California, Los Angeles; the State University of New York at Albany; Princeton University; and Yale University for comments on related drafts. This project was funded in part by the Russell Sage Foundation and the Spencer Foundation.
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Duncan, G.J., Kalil, A. & Ziol-Guest, K.M. Increasing Inequality in Parent Incomes and Children’s Schooling . Demography 54, 1603–1626 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-017-0600-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-017-0600-4