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3. How Families Fared: The College Payoff
- Russell Sage Foundation
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35 Chapter 3 How Families Fared: The College Payoff D espite the fears of some critics that CUNY’s open-admissions policy would prove a failure as thousands of weak students foundered on the harsh realities of academic requirements, we saw in chapter 2 that substantial proportions graduated, often despite serious disadvantages in their academic and socioeconomic backgrounds. However , not all critics of open admissions expected that students’ academic weakness would lead to massive rates of failure. Some predicted that political pressures for academic success would instead produce passing grades for students, even if their performance was subpar—an example of “social promotion” making its presence felt in higher education. Ultimately , students’ degrees would be merely a patina of learning overlaying superficial academic achievement. According to this prediction, CUNY credentials would have limited value in the labor market. In this chapter we will examine the economic payoffs to educational attainments both for the CUNY and national NLSY populations. Decades later, as CUNY women neared age fifty and as the national sample of women neared forty, how well off were they in terms of material resources? How were they doing in terms of their personal earnings? More broadly, what were the economic resources of their households, as indicated by household income and important aspects of economic wellbeing , such as home ownership, savings, equities, and retirement plans? We distinguish between two dimensions of material well-being. The first is women’s individual outcomes in employment, especially their earnings. The second concerns the women’s household and family contexts and their household material resources. Taken together, these two dimensions offer a more complete picture of economic well-being, and a fuller understanding of the resources available to children. Our aim is not only to provide a picture of economic well-being, two decades (NLSY) and three decades (CUNY) after these women started in higher education but also to give a sense of the processes through which educational attainments, work, family, and children have influenced these material results. Ethnic differences are a major theme. Because educational opportunity policies such as open admissions aimed to erase or at least narrow differences in life chances between white and minority students, it is of fundamental importance to consider how the economic payoffs to minority women’s education compare with those of whites. Does Broad College Access Payoff? 1. Personal Earnings Personal earnings are crucial for evaluating the success of open access policies for women who came from families with modest economic resources.1 Median personal earnings in the year 2000 for women in the CUNY sample were $38,968 for all workers and $43,000 for full-time workers (table 3.1). The issue of full-time versus part-time employment is of importance with regard to ethnic differences in earnings. Minority women are more likely to hold full-time jobs than whites. For example, in the CUNY sample, eight in ten black and Hispanic women were working full-time, compared with about six in ten whites. We focus our discussion on those who are employed full-time. As we noted, some critics, believing that academic standards would unravel under open access, expected that the economic value of credentials would plummet. Two aspects of the earnings data in table 3.1 indicate that this devaluation did not happen. First, comparison of CUNY results with earnings for same-age women in the Current Population Survey (U.S. Census Bureau 2000) shows that the earnings of CUNY women exceed those of women at the same educational level in the national sample, in almost every case. We considered whether this occurred because many CUNY women lived in the New York metropolitan area. However, comparisons with national women of comparable education who live in urban areas (also reported in table 3.1) reveal that the two groups have very similar earnings. A second aspect of the data supports the idea that degrees remained valuable: the progression of earnings payoffs as one moves up the credentials ladder. As a regression analysis (table 3.2) shows, payoffs are substantial for each incremental level of educational attainment. For example, CUNY women who completed credits short of a degree earned 14 percent more than early dropouts, a finding consistent with the work of others (Kane and Rouse 1995a) who have found benefits conferred by the accumulation of credits. Associate’s degree completers earned 22 percent more than early dropouts; B.A. recipients earned 33 percent more, while those who completed graduate degrees...