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The American dream is on the decline.
The gap between the rich and the poor has been widening in the United States for years, studies show — and education alone may not be the great equalizer, a new report distributed this week by the National Bureau of Economic Research found. At least, not all by itself. A new analysis of U.S. Census Bureau income data conducted by the University of California, Berkeley found little evidence that schooling alone drives economic and social mobility between parents and their children.
Jesse Rothstein, director at the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment in the University of California, Berkeley, said there’s “little evidence that differences in the quality of K-12 schooling are a key mechanism driving variation in inter-generational mobility.” That social mobility is the cornerstone of the American dream — the idea that anybody can own their own home and ultimately be more successful than the generation before them with enough hard work.
Access to college plays a somewhat larger role, but most of the variation in income mobility reflects differences in marriage patterns, Rothstein concluded. Two-fifths of the change in income across generations can be attributed to marriage and the networks it allows people to access. “This points to job networks and the structure of local labor and marriage markets, rather than the education system, as likely factors influencing inter-generational economic mobility,” Rothstein wrote.
It may also be that those people who attend college use it to make social connections. “Marriage, then, becomes another mechanism through which advantage is protected and passed on,” according to a separate 2013 report by the Brookings Institution, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, which looked at how single motherhood adversely impacted social mobility and exacerbated income inequality, something that is then also passed down to their children.
That report cited the “marriage gap” or what academics refer to as “assortative mating,” the Brookings report noted. “This signals the tendency of like to marry like: Those who are college educated and high-earning marry each other and those with less education and less income marry each other (if they marry at all).” In other words, some women stay in the low income brackets of their parents because they marry someone from a similar background, the report added.
Still, for those who have the money for further education, college has been shown to increase earnings. College graduates earn $1 million more than high school graduates over their lifetimes, a 2015 study by Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce concluded. But earnings vary by state and STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) and health and business majors fared far better than other majors, including the humanities.