Higher Education and the Black-White Earnings Gap

Abstract

How does higher education shape the Black-White earnings gap? It may help close the gap if Black youth benefit more from attending and completing college than do White youth. On the other hand, Black college-goers are less likely to complete college relative to White students, and this disparity in degree completion helps reproduce racial inequality. In this study, we employ a novel causal decomposition and a debiased machine learning method to isolate, quantify, and explain the equalizing and stratifying roles of college. Analyzing data from the NLSY97, we find that among men, a BA degree has a strong equalizing effect on earnings; yet, at the population level, this equalizing effect is partly offset by unequal likelihoods of BA completion between Black and White students. Moreover, a BA degree narrows the male Black-White earnings gap not by reducing the influence of class background and pre-college academic ability, but by lessening the “unexplained” penalty of being Black in the labor market. To illuminate the policy implications of our findings, we estimate counterfactual earnings gaps under a series of stylized educational interventions. We find that interventions that both boost rates of college attendance and BA completion and close racial disparities in these transitions can substantially reduce the Black-White earnings gap.

Social Mobility as Causal Intervention

“…We contribute to the PRTE literature by discussing the consequence of a new type of policy unconsidered in earlier literature. Causal decomposition evaluates the disparity-reduction power of hypothetical interventions (Jackson and VanderWeele, 2018;Jackson, 2020;Lundberg, 2020Lundberg, , 2021Zhou and Pan, 2021;Yu and Elwert, 2021). The We present two examples to illustrate respectively SME on the mean and on dispersion measures.…”