5
Warren Kincaid, Yoshimi Katsuragi, Nate Bizub, Victoria Armet
Inequality in students’ education and educational attainment nationally has been a policy issue throughout modern political history in the US. Starting from a child’s birth, research indicates their level of educational attainment is affected by several metrics, including their parent’s income level and the school district location of the elementary and secondary education (K-12th grade) schools they will attend throughout their childhood. Differentials in an individual’s future wages can be affected at all stages of that individual’s education. While in adolescence, the socioeconomic factors of an individual greatly affect that individual’s future educational attainment and future wages. These same factors also greatly affect an individual’s post-secondary education (college), including whether they even attend college. Similarly, once in a career, that individual’s professional education and on-the-job training also affect their wages and potential income. These inequalities in educational attainment throughout a person’s life largely derive from those socioeconomic factors affecting an individual and their family at their birth. In modern politics today, a national spotlight has been shined on issues of educational inequality, causing several policies with the intent of decreasing these inequalities to be proposed and implemented throughout recent decades, some more effective than others. This chapter will also examine “Gains and Gaps: Changing Inequality in U.S. College Entry and Completion”, a National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) paper by Martha J. Bailey and Susan M. Dynarski, studying inequality in postsecondary educational attainment in the US over more than a thirty-year timespan.
Adolescence
There are a variety of factors introduced within adolescence that play a role in shaping the experience that people come to expect from life which inspires educational aspirations and leads to income variations later in life. Childhood experiences provide a background for expected inequality throughout the rest of someone’s life and also influence the decisions made during adolescence that affect the future inequalities that an individual faces throughout a lifetime. As the factors come into play, students within low-income areas tend to receive worse education opportunities and fewer chances for further educational attainment, affecting future income.
When it comes to parental influences over a children’s schooling, influences can be found in a two-parent family structure and the age of the mother at the time of the birth of the eldest child. Duncan, Kalil, and Ziol (2017) studied these factors in order to determine how large of an affect family structure and age of birth mother at the time of the first child may have on future schooling. The two-parent family structure did not play as large of a role as expected, however the stability offered through this situation generally pr