There’s a long-standing belief that college is “the great equalizer.” For students from low-income families, it’s seen as their way out of intergenerational poverty.
To a certain extent, that’s true. But only when comparing students with a bachelor’s degree.
Once students go on to earn more advanced degrees, wealth-based inequalities reemerge, as those from low-income families are disproportionately shorted in terms of employment opportunities and earnings, research shows.
“The belief in America is once you get into college, you are equal. And if you don’t go to college, intergenerational inequity will be reproduced,” ChangHwan Kim, professor of sociology at the University of Kansas (KU), said in a news release. “That is not necessarily the case when you go to graduate school.”
In a recent paper, Kim and lead author Byeongdon Oh, a KU doctoral student, explain why inequalities resurface when students decide to further their education beyond a bachelor’s degree.
The reasons why
First off, it’s important to understand that there are multiple types of advanced degrees, according to Oh. And these degrees, whether it’s an M.A., MBA, MFA or Ph.D., vary in cost and time needed for completion.
Ph.D.s are the most lucrative, but students need to spend more time and money on them, Oh added. So, students from high-income families are more likely to obtain them. Students from less affluent families, however, have to stop their education at the M.A. or MBA level more frequently.
Secondly, Oh continued, students from high-income families are statistically more likely to go to graduate school in the first place. So, for their bachelor’s degrees, wealthy students commonly pick a liberal arts major, which helps them develop critical thinking skills and enhances their likelihood of being admitted to a selective institution for graduate school. Once these students get to graduate school, however, they typically switch to a more lucrative field, such as medicine or law.
“Nowadays, college tuition is so hard. You invest so much money that you want (a) return on the investment,” Kim said in a news release. “If you come from a rich family, you pursue some interesting topic in college. Then you think of the labor market after that and go to graduate school.”
Lastly, the authors note that those from wealthier families are able to earn their advanced degrees at a younger age and, as a result, see their income and job opportunities grow over their many years in the labor market.
Individuals from low-income families, however, don’t often have that luxury.
“Rich kids can immediately go to graduate school and finish their Ph.D., but other people might take more time, get a job, have a gap year, then come back to school,” Oh said in a news release. “When we compare their salary at age 40, rich kids often have more than 10 years working experience, so they have more salary increase. While poor kids, even though they have a Ph.D., may only have five years of working.”
There is not much variation, though, in income growth for students with an MBA, they found. This is because students in this group “typically have some work experience to begin with,” Kim said in the news release.
For their statistics, Kim and Oh utilized data from the 2010, 2013, 2015 and 2017 National Survey of College Graduates.
As a student currently working towards his doctorate, this research is personal to Oh.
“Previous studies suggested that we can overcome social inequality if we have more education,” he said in a news release. “But many graduate students know there’s a huge inequality in our group. So there is a gap between academic knowledge and public perception. I want to fill those gaps through this research.”
