The Great Equalizer? Race, Educational Attainment, and Success.

• Date: 01 December 2024
• Published date: 01 December 2024

In the United States, people undeniably emphasize educational attainment as a pathway to personal success. Education is not only a mark of achievement but has been accepted as the gateway to achievement, as it is widely known as the "great equalizer." (1) However, recent studies have been revealing evidence that this claim is not true, as social inequalities persist throughout education and into career outcomes.

Social inequalities are complex. Thus, an intersectional framework is necessary for analyzing disparities within educational outcomes. Intersectionality refers to the frame of analysis that examines the intersection of social factors that form a matrix of oppression. (2) This framework allows researchers to see the bigger picture of social inequalities and how they manifest themselves within an individual whose identity is multifaceted.

Recent findings have shown that education itself is not created equal, as the existence of prestigious colleges and their legacy admissions policies exemplify. (3) While education has significant benefits, access to higher education opportunities is also unequal, as underprivileged families often lack the resources and the knowledge to fully invest in their children's education in comparison to families with higher socioeconomic status. (4) While higher education has been proven to have high returns that improve lives, formal education does not teach certain life skills. Rather, this knowledge indicates a privileged upbringing with a plethora of cultural capital, a term coined by Pierre Bourdieu to describe the knowledge and skills an individual learns from their habitus. (5) This type of capital affects a person's quality of education and the ability to navigate professional spaces. (6) Thus, it has been concluded that students with more cultural capital have covert advantages over those with less cultural capital, (7) which is one way in which marginalized communities that receive higher education are still at a disadvantage compared to their privileged peers.

Race is one social factor that impacts career advancement after degree completion. These findings are consistent with research that reveals race's significant effects on occupational prestige. Additionally, research implies that the intersection of race and gender is more impactful for some races than others in determining occupation and professional achievements. (8) This is partly due to discriminatory hiring practices in which Black job candidates receive fewer employer responses, and when they do, they are often for jobs with lower salaries and lower prestige, (9) but it also manifests itself in more covert ways. Evidence has shown that white people tend to have more access to influential social ties that give them advantages and receive more informal support such as money and advice than people of color, (10) which is significant in understanding where job opportunities truly come from. As Steve McDonald, Nan Lin, and Dan Ao concluded, "Gender/race inequality in access to job information is indeed prevalent in the labor market, particularly at the highest level of workplace authority. These findings underscore the utility of examinations of unequal access to job information." (11) Research conducted on intergenerational mobility among individuals who have gone to college reveals such inconsistencies. While social mobility is substantial among Ph.D. holders, the degree does not erase social inequalities for marginalized groups. (12)

Due to the complexity of social inequality explained above, it was hypothesized that education attainment will positively affect social mobility. That effect will vary among races, but it will have the most significant impact on white individuals.

Data and Methods

This analysis used data from the General Social Survey (GSS) and the statistical analysis program Survey Documentation and Analysis (SDA) to examine different social factors. The data used are from 2022. The GSS is a national survey conducted since 1972 designed to provide representative data on those living in the United States. The surveys cover a wide variety of topics, from demographics down to special interests. (13)

This study has one independent variable (DEGREE) and several dependent variables to examine whether and how various social factors, including class, occupational prestige, and income, are affected by educational attainment.

The independent variable (DEGREE) was re-coded into two categories: one for respondents who had a high school diploma or did not graduate high school and the second for respondents who received education beyond high school. This included associate degrees and junior college, bachelor degrees, and graduate-level degrees. Independent variable:

The variable CLASS was recoded into two categories: lower/working class and middle/upper class. The variable RINCOM16 (respondent's income) was also recoded to measure the respondent's income in relation to the poverty level and the U.S. average income, which was approximately $60,000 in 2022, according to the Social Security Administration.

The variable PRESTG10, a measurement of a respondent's occupational prestige level, was re-coded as "OCCPRESTIGE" to display a condensed variable of low or high level of prestige. Categories were created based on the 2010 Census Occupational Category prestige scores provided in the GSS Codebook. Important to note is that prestige scores vary widely within fields. For example, although they are both in healthcare, a medical technician does not hold the same prestige as a physician. Hence, the categories are labeled from low to high. Occupational prestige is measured from 0 to 100, zero being the lowest and 100 being the highest. Scores were collapsed into three groups, indicating low, medium, or high prestige.

Race was the primary control variable in comparing how educational attainment effects differ across races. For further analysis, the respondent's sex was added to illuminate the intersection of sex and race. It is important to note that for both control variables, a very limited definition of racial and sex categories was used. The study categorized RACE as White, Black, or Other and recorded SEX as either Female or Male.

Table 7 clearly supports the expected impact of education on class. The majority of respondents who did not receive higher education were lower or working class, while the majority of those who went to college or beyond were middle or upper class. This table shows that education made a 35.2 percent difference in determining class for all respondents. This is statistically significant, with a p-value of 0.00.

For white...