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Education in the United States can reduce or expand inequality. Education reduces inequality when it provides opportunities for individuals to improve their socioeconomic positions. Education expands inequality when it enables already advantaged individuals to accumulate additional advantages. But what happens when education is completed in mid-life? Education attained after age 25 – which I call educational upgrading – has the potential to reduce or expand inequality. Upgrading can reduce inequality if it provides opportunities for individuals to "catch up" after facing earlier disadvantages; it can expand inequality if it enables already advantaged individuals to pull further ahead. In this dissertation, I examine the extent to which educational upgrading reduces, expands, or maintains inequalities over the life course in the United States.
In the first empirical chapter, I use data from the Health and Retirement Study to investigate how upgrading has reshaped educational inequalities by race, class, and gender over time. I find that, rather than providing opportunities for disadvantaged individuals to "catch up," upgrading tends to preserve and expand inequalities established earlier in the life course. This pattern persists across forty years of birth cohorts. Further, upgrading introduces inequality in degree timing by race and class. Bachelor’s degree holders who are Black, Hispanic, and from low socioeconomic backgrounds tend to complete their degrees later than their more advantaged counterparts, and thus have less time to benefit from their education.
In the second empirical chapter, I examine how much educational upgrading "pays off." Using data from the National Longitudinal Studies of Youth 1979 and 1997 cohorts along with augmented inverse probability weights and multilevel growth curve models, I estimate the causal impact of completing a Bachelor's degree after age 25 on individuals’ earnings trajectories. I find that, across both cohorts, earning a BA after age 25 does indeed pay off. Late completers’ post-BA earnings trajectories are similar to those of individuals who completed a BA earlier. And, compared to non-completers, late completers' earnings advantages grow substantially over the life course. A BA appears to be worth it, even when completed later in the life course.
In the third empirical chapter, I examine whether educational upgrading reduces or expands racial inequality in the United States. I develop the racialized education careers framework to analyze how population level inequalities between Black and White people evolve over the life course. This framework emphasizes two points. First, racialized educational disparities accumulate over the life course. Second, the returns to education vary both by race and by the life stage in which education is completed. Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Youth 1979 and a decomposition approach, I find that racial inequalities in upgrading patterns expand inequality while racial inequalities in the returns to upgrading reduce it. As a result, upgrading maintains racial inequality over the life course.
This dissertation demonstrates that education contributes to inequality even after traditional schooling ages. Upgrading tends to provide additional opportunities over the life course while cementing earlier established inequalities. Importantly, examining upgrading underscores that educational attainment is a cumulative process. The extent to which educational upgrading reduces or expands inequality depends not only on who upgrades or how upgrading pays off, but also on earlier established educational inequalities. Situating upgrading within the educational attainment process highlights how the cumulative nature of education can undermine its equalizing capacity.