Race, College Degree, and Upward Intergenerational Mobility

In this article, I study rates of upward intergenerational mobility within and across race/ethnicity and by college degree status using nationally representative data from the NLSY 1997 cohorts. Using probability models, I look at mobility rates for various outcomes when individuals are ages 30 to 35, including labor income, household income, and wealth, and look at absolute and rank mobility rates for each measure. Absolute mobility measures improvements from one generation to the next, and rank mobility measures movement up the income/wealth rank. I find that Blacks with a degree do better on all measures than Blacks without a degree. Hispanics without a degree do as well as, or better than, Hispanics with a degree on most measures, while non-Black-non-Hispanics with a degree do better on all measures than their nondegree same-race counterparts. Blacks see the largest differences in mobility between degree and nondegree holders. Across race, holding non-Blacks-non-Hispanics without a degree as the reference group, Blacks with a college degree have higher rates of absolute labor income mobility, household income mobility, and household income rank mobility, but lower labor income rank mobility and lower absolute and rank wealth mobility. Hispanics, regardless of degree status, have higher rates of mobility than the reference group on most measures. These results suggest an association between college degree and intergenerational mobility within race for Blacks, but a college degree is not enough to bridge the gaps across race. For Hispanics, there is upward mobility across race, but the role of a college degree appears weak.