Carl A. Grant Scholars Lecture Series | Educational Attainment and Wealth Mobility in the Student Debt Cohort

November 1, 2024 – November 1, 2024, noon - 1:30 p.m.

259 Educational Sciences

Dr. Jordan Conwell

University of Texas at Austin

Dr. Jordan Conwell

The paper to be presented assesses intergenerational wealth mobility by level of completed schooling (less than high school, high school, associate’s degree, bachelor’s degree, or master’s degree or higher) using data from the 1997 Cohort of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY-97), with the oldest cohort members now followed up to age 40. This provides a test of the hypothesis that education is a “Great Equalizer” of economic mobility outcomes that is novel in three ways: I consider the outcome of wealth mobility, at times in comparison to the literature’s more commonly studied outcome of income mobility; consider both parent-child wealth correlations and the direction of positional wealth mobility transitions of one decile or more; and estimate pooled results and then test for potential heterogeneity between Blacks, Hispanics, and those who are neither Black nor Hispanic. After presenting results, I will discuss implications for the understanding of education’s potential meritocratic power its debt financing era, with an emphasis on current debates about the value of bachelor’s and graduate level higher education for contemporary cohorts.