Intergenerational Educational (Im)mobility Among Those Born in the United States,1940 to 1990

Abstract

This visualization highlights patterns of intergenerational educational immobility across five birth cohorts in the United States. Namely, a strong link is observed between parent and offspring educational attainment that has remained largely stable over the years. The author discusses the challenges of achieving equality of educational opportunity in the United States in light of the relative nature of educational credentials.

The United States underwent a massive expansion of higher education during the latter half of the twentieth century (Schofer and Meyer 2005). Yet the consequences of this expansion in terms of equalizing opportunity across social strata remain unclear. On one hand, growing access for less advantaged groups could weaken the link between social origin and educational attainment. On the other hand, we might expect a stable parent-offspring relationship if increasing attainment at one level is coupled with growth at the next higher level.

Figure 1 visualizes the association between parent and offspring educational attainment across cohorts born in the United States. Specifically, the figure provides an origin-destination matrix, with rows corresponding to parents’ education level and columns corresponding to offspring educational attainment by decade. I use a yellow-to-blue color palette to highlight which transitions are more likely, with darker shaded cells corresponding to a higher conditional probability of attainment at that level. Overall, there is a moderately strong rank-rank association between parent and offspring education (ρ = .39–.44 for each cohort), with darker shaded cells found closer to the diagonal (see additional matrices for reference). Importantly, these patterns have remained largely the same over time, as revealed by the strikingly similar shades across cohorts within a given destination cell. Additionally, differences across cohorts (i.e., left to right) seem much smaller, in general, compared with differences by parental education level (i.e., top to bottom).

Figure 1.

Conditional probability of degree attainment among those born in the United States from the 1940s through the 1980s.

Consequently, Figure 1 draws attention to two distinct challenges of achieving equality of educational opportunity in the United States. One challenge entails improving attainment for all students at a given level. For example, if we look at those whose parents earned less than a high school degree, we observe a slow increase in the probability of obtaining a BA degree by the 1980s cohort. A second issue, however, surrounds the relative (or positional) nature of educational credentials in the United States (Shavit and Park 2016). Namely, increasing attainment for less advantaged groups at one level has been coupled with disparities in attainment at the subsequent level. For instance, even though the 1980s BA and MA+ columns are slightly darker for all groups relative to their 1970s equivalents, if we then compare shades across parental education levels (or down the columns), we notice even starker differences that have remained largely stable across time. These patterns thus provide support for the theory of maximally maintained inequality (Raftery and Hout 1993), where expanding access at one level of education spurs students from privileged backgrounds to seek out schooling at the next higher level, thereby maintaining their advantage.

This analysis considered those who were born before 1990, which allowed adequate time for individuals to reach the highest degree levels. Future research should monitor the patterns presented here. A sobering possibility is that the link between parent education and offspring education becomes even stronger as future cohorts question the value of a college degree, which may disproportionately occur among those of less privileged backgrounds. Although recent studies continue to demonstrate the significant economic returns to a BA credential (Zhang, Liu, and Hu 2024), research on alternative ways to conceptualize the full value of a college education beyond just earnings seems critical for continuing to engage students from all backgrounds (see Brand 2023).

Supplemental Material

sj-docx-1-srd-10.1177_23780231241271717 – Supplemental material for Intergenerational Educational (Im)mobility Among Those Born in the United States, 1940 to 1990

Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-srd-10.1177_23780231241271717 for Intergenerational Educational (Im)mobility Among Those Born in the United States, 1940 to 1990 by Wesley Jeffrey in Socius