Growing Wealth Gaps in Higher Education
Source: New York Times
A new study by Fabian T. Pfeffer (University of Michigan), supported in part by the Russell Sage Foundation and published in the latest issue of Demography, finds that wealth gaps in college attainment have grown significantly, with college graduation rates for students from higher wealth backgrounds surging while graduation rates for those of lower wealth have stayed relatively flat. “Children from the top 20 percent of the wealth distribution have pulled away from everyone else, increasing their B.A. rates by a whopping 14 percentage points in just a decade,” Pfeffer notes.
While prior research on educational inequality has largely focused on attainment gaps by family income or parental occupation, Pfeffer provides the first assessment of trends in educational attainment by family wealth. Using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), he compares the college graduation rates of students born in the 1970s to those born in the 1980s. He finds that for children born in the 1970s, the college graduation rate among those who grew up in the top 20 percent of the wealth distribution was 39.5 percentage points higher than among those who grew up in the bottom 20 percent. But for children born only a decade later, that wealth gap in college attainment grew to 48.9 percentage points. Writes Pfeffer, “This rapid increase in wealth inequality in college attainment is especially concerning because the stakes of college completion have also been rising, both at the individual and at the societal level.”
For poor students—those in the bottom 40 percent of households in the wealth distribution—rates of college enrollment went up for students born in the 1970s compared to those born in the 90s. But graduation rates for both cohorts remained around 11 percent. “The result is both counterintuitive and alarming,” New York Times reporter David Leonhardt wrote in a recent column on Pfeffer’s study. “Even as the college-attendance gap between rich and poor has shrunk, the gap in the number of rich and poor college graduates has grown. That shouldn’t be happening.”