Does Educational Equality Increase Mobility? Exploiting Nineteenth-Century U.S. Compulsory Schooling Laws

Abstract

Existing evidence of educational effects on intergenerational mobility is associational. This study employs early compulsory schooling laws to approach a causal estimate of the relationship between education and mobility in the context of a large-scale policy change. Using IPUMS Linked Representative Samples ðlinked census dataÞ, regression discontinuity models exploit state differences in the timing of compulsory schooling laws to estimate an intent-to-treat effect on intergenerational occupational mobility among white males. Despite increasing equality of attendance, results reveal that compulsory laws initially reduced relative mobility for the first few cohorts affected by the laws. Among later cohorts, who were required to attend the maximum years of school, mobility was similar to prelaw levels. School funding and other data suggest that structural lag could explain this nonlinear relationship. It seems, therefore, that educational expansion inadvertently reduced mobility through institutional inertia rather than elite efforts to maintain advantage.

Analyses of Intergenerational Mobility

“…Particularly interesting analyses are offered by Mayer and Lopoo (2008) and Rauscher (2014), who attempt to capture determinants of mobility variation across time and place using causal inference techniques. Mayer and Lopoo (2008) use fixed effects and find weaker elasticities in U.S. states with larger per child spending.…”

The Decline and Persistence of the Old Boy: Private Schools and Elite Recruitment 1897 to 2016

“…Yet an extensive body of research now offers a sobering corrective to this lofty ideal. Even though the widespread provision of free schooling has certainly reduced inequalities in educational attainment (Breen and Jonsson 2005), scholars working across a range of national contexts—but particularly in the United Kingdom and the United States—have found that the expansion of public education has largely failed to equalize relative opportunities in the labor market (Goldthorpe 2016; Parman 2011; Pfeffer and Hertel 2015; Rauscher 2016).…”

Historical Census Record Linkage

“…For example, Saperstein and Gullickson (2013) explored the fluidity of black and mulatto racial categories between the 1870 and 1880 censuses. Rauscher (2016) used variation in the timing of compulsory school attendance laws to study the impact of those laws on differentials in occupational mobility. Paradoxically, the immediate impact of compulsory attendance was to reduce occupational mobility, possibly because schools in working-class districts were unprepared for the sudden influx of new students.…”