About the event

The Stone Center for Inequality Dynamics and the Panel Study of Income Dynamics will co-host Jordan Conwell, associate professor of sociology at the University of Texas at Austin, with co-sponsorship from the University of Michigan Department of Sociology.

Abstract
Research on whether schooling is a “great equalizer” considers whether and how the association between parents’ and children’s incomes varies across levels of children’s completed schooling, with weaker relationships taken as evidence of greater meritocracy. We use data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to build on this literature in three ways. First, we consider whether and how these patterns vary by race, comparing income mobility by offspring educational attainment across Black and White family lineages. Second, in line with a sociohistorical perspective on the interplay between race, education, and income, we assess income mobility based on relationships between grandparents’ and grandchildren’s household incomes within levels of grandchildren’s completed schooling. Third, we expand this literature’s conceptualization and measurement of income mobility beyond summary measures of average mobility to also include rates of upward and downward mobility. Our findings offer a novel perspective on for whom, over what span of generational time, and by what metric educational attainment is associated with meritocratic social mobility outcomes.