Skip to main content

Advertisement

SpringerLink
Log in

The Equalizing Power of a College Degree for First-Generation College Students: Disparities Across Institutions, Majors, and Achievement Levels

  • Published:
Research in Higher Education Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Researchers have paid increasing attention to issues of access and retention among first-generation college students but have focused less on their post-college outcomes. We extend this literature by investigating if there is a generational wage gap, that is, a gap between first- and continuing-generation students’ wages. We also ask how the generational wage gap varies across institutions, majors, and achievement levels, and what accounts for it. Using data from the Baccalaureate and Beyond Longitudinal Study, we show that 10 years after completing college there is a substantial generational wage gap. However, for women, the generational wage gap fades when controlling for individual characteristics such as race and motherhood status. For men, the generational wage gap does not disappear when controlling for individual characteristics, but does disappear when controlling for labor market characteristics. In addition, we find that the generational wage gap is more a product of how students are distributed into industries, jobs, and work locations than how they are distributed into educational institutions, majors, and achievement levels.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. Limiting the sample to adults who graduated before age 40 removes 5% of the sample. We find no differences in employment rates for first- and continuing-generation men (95%), and only slightly higher employment rates for first-generation college women compared to continuing-generation women (84 vs. 79%). Two-stage selection models, predicting the probability of employment in the first stage and salary in the second stage, did not identify potential issues related to selection into employment.

  2. We use the mi impute chained command in Stata 14 (StataCorp 2015). We imputed values for occupation (17), job sector (32), school size (45), hours worked (112), postgraduate major (156), race (157), gender (157), age (184), having dependents (271), parental education (410), major (418), institutional selectivity (493), job placement rate (598), GPA (653), and location (662).

  3. To account for possibly non-linear effects of age, we also included a squared term for age.

  4. For more information, see http://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/urban-influence-codes.aspx.

  5. Following the consensus in the literature, we apply survey weights and replicate weights to construct descriptive statistics (Kish & Frankel, 1974).

  6. Following Winship and Radbill (1994), we do not apply weights when running the regression analyses.

  7. β coefficients indicate the change in the difference in the logs of expected counts for a one unit change in the predictor variable; after exponentiating, coefficients can be interpreted as an incidence rate ratio (IRR).

References

  • Armstrong, E., & Hamilton, L. (2013). Paying for the party. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Astin, A., & Oseguera, L. (2004). The declining ‘equity’ of American higher education. Review of Higher Education, 27(3), 321–341.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Autor, D. (2014). Skills, education, and the rise of earnings inequality among the ‘other 99 Percent’. Science, 44(6186), 843–851.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Blinder, A. (1973). Wage discrimination: Reduced form and structural estimates. Journal of Human Resources, 8, 436–455.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bobbit-Zeher, D. (2007). The gender income gap and the role of education. Sociology of Education, 80(1), 1–22.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Borjas, G. (2002). The wage structure and the sorting of workers into the public sector. National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper 9313.

  • Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bourdieu, P. (1988). Homo Academicus. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bowen, W., Kurzweil, M., & Tobin, E. (2005). Equity and excellence in American higher education. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Brand, J., & Xie, Y. (2010). Who benefits most from college? Evidence for negative selection in heterogeneous economic returns to higher education. American Sociological Review, 75(2), 273–302.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Brewer, D., Eide, E., & Ehrenberg, R. (1999). Does it pay to attend an elite private college? Cross-cohort evidence on the effects of college type on earnings. The Journal of Human Resources, 34(1), 104–123.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Buchmann, C., & DiPrete, T. (2006). The growing female advantage in college completion: The role of family background and academic achievement. American Sociological Review, 71(4), 515–541.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Carnevale, A., Cheah, B., & Hanson, A. (2015). The economics value of college majors. Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce.

  • Chetty, R., Frieman, J., Saez, E., Turner, N, & Yagan, D. (2017). Mobility report cards: The role of colleges in intergenerational mobility. Working paper: http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org/papers/coll_mrc_paper.pdf.

  • Chetty, R., Hendren, N., Kline, P., Saez, E., & Turner, N. (2014). Is the United States still a land of opportunity? Recent trends in intergenerational mobility. American Economic Review, 104(5), 141–147.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Choy, S. (2001). Students whose parents did not go to college: Postsecondary access, persistence, and attainment. Condition of Education. Washington, DC: National Center for Education Statistics.

  • Dale, S., & Krueger, A. (2002). Estimating the payoff to attending a more selective college: An application of selection on observables and unobservables. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 117(4), 1491–1527.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Dale, S., & Krueger, A. (2014). Estimating the effects of college characteristics over the career using administrative earnings data. The Journal of Human Resources, 49(2), 323–358.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Davies, S., & Guppy, N. (1997). Fields of study, college selectivity, and student inequalities in higher education. Social Forces, 75(4), 1417–1438.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Davies, S., & Zarifa, D. (2012). The stratification of universities: Structural inequality in Canada and the United States. Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, 30, 143–158.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Dumais, S. (2002). Cultural capital, gender, and school success: The role of habitus. Sociology of Education, 75(1), 44–68.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Elwert, F., & Winship, C. (2014). Endogenous selection bias: The problem of conditioning on a collider variable. Annual Review of Sociology, 40, 31–53.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • England, P., & Li, S. (2006). Desegregation stalled: The changing sex composition of college majors, 1971–2002. Gender & Society, 20(5), 657–677.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Erickson, B. (1996). Culture, class, and connections. American Journal of Sociology, 102, 217–251.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Erola, J., Jalonen, S., & Lehti, H. (2016). Parental education, class and income over early life course and children’s achievement. Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, 44, 33–43.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gerber, S., & Cheung, S. (2008). Horizontal stratification in postsecondary education: Forms, explanations, and implications. Annual Review of Sociology, 34, 299–318.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Giancola, J. & Kahlenberg, R. (2016). True Merit: Ensuring Our Brightest Students Have Access to Our Best Colleges and Universities. Jack Kent Cooke Foundation, http://www.jkcf.org/assets/1/7/JKCF_True_Merit_Report.pdf.

  • Giani, M. (2016). Are all colleges equally equalizing? How institutional selectivity impacts socioeconomic disparities in graduates’ labor outcomes. Research in Higher Education, 39(3), 431–461.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gould, W. (2011). Use poisson rather than regress; tell a friend. The Stata Blog, August 22: http://blog.stata.com/2011/08/22/use-poisson-rather-than-regress-tell-a-friend.

  • Goyette, K., & Mullen, A. (2006). Who studies the arts and sciences? Social background and the choice and consequences of undergraduate field of study. The Journal of Higher Education, 77(3), 497–538.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gregg, P., Jonsson, J., Macmillian, L., & Mood, C. (2017). The role of education for intergenerational income mobility: A comparison of the United States, Great Britain, and Sweden. Social Forces, 96(1), 121–152.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hamilton, L. (2016). Parenting to a degree. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Hansen, M. (2001). Education and economics rewards variation by social origin and income measures. European Sociological Review, 17(3), 209–231.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hout, M. (1988). More universalism, less structural mobility: The American occupational structure in the 1980s. American Sociological Review, 93(6), 1358–1400.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Jann, B. (2008). The Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition for linear regression models. The Stata Journal, 8(4), 453–479.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Karp, D. (1986). ‘You can take the boy out of Dorchester, but you can’t take Dorchester out of the boy’: Toward a social-psychology of mobility. Symbolic Interaction, 9(1), 19–36.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kim, C. H., Tamborini, C., & Sakamoto, A. (2015). Field of study in college and lifetime earnings in the United States. Sociology of Education, 88(4), 320–339.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kim, Y., & Sax, L. (2009). Student-faculty interaction in research universities: Differences by student gender, race, social class, and first-generation status. Research in Higher Education, 50(5), 437–459.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kish, L., & Frankel, M. R. (1974). Inference from complex samples. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series B (Methodological), 36, 1–37.

    Google Scholar 

  • Laurison, D., & Friedman, S. (2016). The class pay gap in higher professional and managerial occupations. American Sociological Review, 81(4), 668–695.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lee, E. (2016). Class and campus life. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lucas, S. (2001). Effectively maintained inequality: Education transitions, track mobility, and social background effects. American Journal of Sociology, 106(6), 1642–1690.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Mouw, T., & Kalleberg, A. (2010). Occupations and the structure of wage inequality in the United States, 1980s–2000s. American Sociological Review, 75(3), 402–431.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Mullen, A. (2010). Degrees of inequality. Baltimore: John Hopkins.

    Google Scholar 

  • Nichols, A. (2010). Regression for nonnegative skewed dependent variables. Boston, MA: Stata conference, July 15.

  • Oaxaca, R. (1973). Male–female wage differentials in urban labor markets. International Economic Review, 14, 693–709.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Pascarella, E., Cruce, T., Wolniak, G., & Blaich, C. (2004a). Do liberal arts colleges really foster good practices in undergraduate education? Journal of College Student Development, 45(1), 57–74.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Pascarella, E., Pierson, C., Wolniak, G., & Terenzini, P. (2004b). First-generation college students: Additional evidence on college experiences and outcomes. The Journal of Higher Education, 75(3), 249–284.

    Google Scholar 

  • Pfeffer, F., & Hertel, F. (2015). How has educational expansion shaped social mobility trends in the United States? Social Forces, 94(1), 143–180.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Powers, D., Yoshioka, H., & Yun, M. S. (2011). mvdcmp: Multivariate decomposition for nonlinear response models. Stata Journal, 11(4), 556–576.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Radford, A. (2013). Top student, top school?. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Rivera, L. (2015). Pedigree. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Rivera, L., & Tilcsik, A. (2016). Class advantage, commitment penalty: The gendered effect of social class signals in an elite labor market. American Sociological Review, 81(6), 1097–1131.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Roksa, J., Grodsky, E., Arum, R., & Gamoran, A. (2007). The United States: Changes in higher education and social stratification. In Y. Shavit, A. Gamoran, & R. Arum (Eds.), Social stratification in higher education (pp. 165–191). Stanford: Stanford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Rowan-Kenyon, H. T., Bell, A., & Perna, L. W. (2008). How parents shape college opportunity for their children: Variations by socioeconomic status. Journal of Higher Education, 79, 564–586.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Rossi, A., & Hersch, J. (2008). Double your major, double your return? Economics of Education Review, 27(4), 375–386.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • StataCorp. (2015). Stata 14 base reference manual. College Station, TX: Stata Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Stephens, N., Fryberg, S., Markus, H. R., Johnson, C., & Covarrubias, R. (2012). Unseen disadvantage: How American universities’ focus on independence undermines the academic performance of first-generation college students. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 102(6), 1178–1197.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Streib, J. (2015). The power of the past. New York: Oxford University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Stuber, J. (2005). Asset or liability? The importance of context in the occupational experiences of upwardly mobile white adults. Sociological Forum, 20(1), 139–166.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Stuber, J. (2011). Inside the college gates. Landham, MD: Lexington.

    Google Scholar 

  • Thomas, K. (2015). The hidden value of highbrow taste: How cultural signals of class shape U.S. labor market outcomes. Unpublished manuscript.

  • Thomas, S. (2000). Deferred costs and economic returns to college major, quality, and performance. Research in Higher Education, 41(3), 281–313.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Thomas, S., & Zhang, L. (2005). Post-baccalaureate wage growth within four years of graduation: The effects of college quality and college major. Research in Higher Education, 46(4), 437–459.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Torche, F. (2011). Is a college degree still the great equalizer? Intergenerational mobility across levels of schooling in the United States. American Journal of Sociology, 117(3), 763–807.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Walpole, M. (2003). Socioeconomic status and college: How SES affects college experiences and outcomes. The Review of Higher Education, 27, 45–73.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Wilbur, T., & Roscigno, V. (2016). First-generation disadvantage and college enrollment/completion. Socius, 2, 1–11.

    Google Scholar 

  • Wildhagen, T. (2015). ‘Not your typical college student’: The social construction of ‘first-generation’ college student. Qualitative Sociology, 38(3), 285–303.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Wine, J., Cominole, M., Wheeless, S., Dudley, K., & Franklin, J. (2005). 1993/03 Baccalaureate and Beyond Longitudinal Study (B&B:93/03) Methodology Report (NCES 2006–166). U.S. Department of Education. Washington, DC: National Center for Education Statistics.

  • Winship, C., & Radbill, L. (1994). Sampling weights and regression analysis. Sociological Methods & Research, 23(2), 230–257.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Witteveen, D., & Attewell, P. (2017). Family background and earnings inequality among college graduates. Social Forces, 95(4), 1539–1576.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Wolniak, G., Seifert, T., Reed, E., & Pascarella, E. (2008). College majors and social mobility. Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, 26(2), 123–139.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Wooldridge, J. (2010). Econometric analysis of cross section and panel data. Cambridge: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Yankow, J. (2006). Why do cities pay more? An empirical examination of some competing theories of the urban wage premium. Journal of Urban Economics, 60(2), 139–161.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Yee, A. (2016). The unwritten rules of engagement: Social class differences in undergraduates’ academic strategies. The Journal of Higher Education, 87(6), 831–858.

    Google Scholar 

  • Zhang, L. (2005). Does quality pay?. New York: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. North Carolina State University, 2400 Founders Drive, Raleigh, NC, 27695-8107, USA

    Anna Manzoni

  2. Duke University, 276 Soc/Psych Building, 417 Chapel Dr., Box 90088, Durham, NC, 27708-0088, USA

    Jessi Streib

Authors
  1. Anna Manzoni
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Jessi Streib
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Anna Manzoni.

Additional information

We would like to thank Lisa Keister, Angie O’Rand, Toby Parcel, Moris Triventi, and Greg Wolniak for their helpful comments on the manuscript.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Manzoni, A., Streib, J. The Equalizing Power of a College Degree for First-Generation College Students: Disparities Across Institutions, Majors, and Achievement Levels. Res High Educ 60, 577–605 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11162-018-9523-1

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11162-018-9523-1

Keywords

Search

Navigation