Three Essays On Educational Decisions And Labor Market Outcomes Of Youths PDF Download

This dissertation consists of three studies that shed light on the ongoing transformation of higher education's role in producing inequality and transmitting advantages across generations in the United States. The first chapter examines the most educated Americans: graduate and professional degree holders. The subsequent two chapters, by contrast, shift focus to young adults' transition into higher education, examining how schools and local labor markets shape racial inequality in the transition from high school to college.The first empirical chapter examines horizontal stratification among graduate and professional degree programs and their connection to the new economic elite. Compared to the baccalaureate level, there has been relatively little empirical research on distinctions among graduate and professional degrees and how they relate to labor market inequality. I add to this emerging literature with 30 years of linked survey data containing an unprecedented level of detail on the lives of the most educated Americans. I track recent historical changes in who attains top-ranked MBAs, JDs, MDs, and PhDs, finding a marked increase in the influence of parental education on elite degree attainment. This novel evidence suggests the solidifying of an intergenerational class of highly educated professionals in the United States. Second, I explore the earnings returns to program rank across different degree types, and by gender and parental education, with a particular focus on the top percentile of the earnings distribution. Unlike at the baccalaureate level, the earnings returns to prestige vary significantly across fields, such that they are much higher in MBA and JD programs than research doctorate or medical programs. I also find that the earnings returns to prestige are higher for children from less-educated families, suggesting a potential equalizing effect of elite postbaccalaureate programs. The second empirical chapter examines how local labor markets shape college attendance behavior differently by race and gender. A long-standing sociological literature has established that white students are substantially less likely to attend four-year colleges than are Black students with similar socioeconomic resources and academic performance. Drawing on accounts of racial labor market segregation among workers without bachelor's degrees, I hypothesize that racialized and gendered access to good sub-baccalaureate jobs-for instance, jobs in the trades-may account for racial differences in college attendance. I test this hypothesis empirically using administrative data on students attending high school in Wisconsin, examining net racial differences in college attendance across labor markets with varying degrees of racial occupational segregation. I do not find clear support for my hypothesis. However, I do find that white boys are more likely than Black boys to attend two-year colleges in places with more racially segregated labor markets. This finding suggests that a net-White advantage in vocational education pathways parallels the net-Black advantage in four-year college attendance, and provides some support for the hypothesized labor market mechanism. The third empirical chapter, co-authored with Christian Michael Smith, examines how high school course enrollment policies and school officials' decision-making affect racial inequality in high school tracking on the path to college. Prior work in sociology has produced conflicting evidence on whether and to what extent school officials' decision-making contributes to these patterns. We advance this literature by examining the effects of schools' enrollment policies for Advanced Placement (AP) courses. Using a unique combination of school survey data and administrative data from Wisconsin, we examine what happens to racial inequality in AP participation when school officials enforce performance-based selection criteria, which we call "course gatekeeping." We find that course gatekeeping has racially disproportionate effects. Although racialized differences in prior achievement partially explain the especially large negative effects among students of color, course gatekeeping produces Black-white and Hispanic-white disparities in participation even among students with similar, relatively low prior achievement. We further find that course gatekeeping has longer-run effects, particularly discouraging Black and Asian or Pacific Islander students from attending highly selective four-year colleges.