Join us for a seminar and discussion with Deirdre Bloome on “Educational Inequalities, Educational Expansion, and Intergenerational Income Mobility in the United States.”
The event will take place in Room 9204.
Deirdre Bloome is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and a faculty affiliate of the Population Studies Center and the Survey Research Center at the University of Michigan. Currently, she is on leave as a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation. Her research uses demographic and statistical techniques to understand how patterns of social stratification are produced and reproduced in the United States. She holds a Ph.D. in sociology and social policy and an A.M. in statistics, both from Harvard University, and a certificate in demography from the Office of Population Research at Princeton University. Her current topics of investigation include the relationships among economic inequality, mobility, and insecurity, the historical evolution of racial inequality in income and family structure, and statistical methods for characterizing population heterogeneity. Her previous work has been published in outlets including the American Sociological Review, Demography, Social Forces, Sociological Methodology, and the Annual Review of Sociology.
Paper Abstract
How has intergenerational income mobility remained stable in the United States while income gaps between people with different levels of education have grown? In recent decades, college graduates have pulled away from non-graduates in both their parents’ incomes and their eventual, adult incomes. In light of these trends, scholars predicted that intergenerational income mobility would decline. Yet previous research suggests that it has remained stable. To address this puzzle, we develop decomposition and model- based methods to disentangle education’s dual roles in the mobility process: Education not only perpetuates incomes across generations; it also fosters upward mobility. Using data from the 1979 and 1997 cohorts of the National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth, we find that rising parental income gaps across levels of education exerted strong downward pressure on income mobility. Yet two countervailing changes offset this downward pressure, stabilizing mobility. First, because mobility is highest among college graduates, educational expansion—more people completing college, whatever their parents’ income—bolstered mobility. Second, mobility rose within education groups. We discuss these findings in light of changes in the transition to adulthood and changes in the labor market.