Growing Wealth Gaps in Education

The increase in rates across net worth quintiles is relatively linear for all levels of educational attainment, though we can observe a somewhat steeper increase in high school graduation rates in the bottom half of the distribution and a steeper increase in college college graduation in the top half of the distribution. [...] That is, despite some decreases in wealth gaps in high school attainment and college access, the clearest and largest change in the distribution of educational opportunity lies in the rising gap between those from the top 20 percent of the wealth distribution and everyone else. [...] Growing wealth gaps in college graduation in the context of rising wealth inequality In the remainder, I will focus on the growing wealth gap in college completion – as the most concerning finding yielded by the analyses provided above – and assess to what degree it is related to the growth in wealth inequality. [...] However, as shown in the second panel of Table 3, the predicted and observed wealth gaps in college graduation diverge from each other, mostly because apply- ing the wealth effects estimated in the earlier cohort to the wealth distribution of the later cohort underestimates the college attainment of the top quintile (45.2 percent versus 57.1 percent), that is, it misses most of the surge in colleg. [...] Furthermore, I have described that the documented growth in wealth inequality in college attainment occurs in the context of rising inequality in the wealth origins of the children studied here.