This article investigates White, Black, and Hispanic men’s and women’s access and midlife labor market returns to college quality. To do so, we use data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth-1979 Cohort (NLSY-79), merged with college quality information from the Barron’s Admissions Competitiveness Index. Although prior research has investigated similar dynamics in access and returns to higher education, this work typically excludes Hispanics and does not assess enrollments at community colleges and other less competitive colleges where Black and Hispanic enrollments tend to cluster. We find that Black–White and Hispanic–White differences in college quality, to Whites’ advantage, were fully explained or reversed once we accounted for differences in students’ backgrounds. At midlife, Hispanic and especially Black men had lower rates of labor force participation than White men who attended colleges of the same quality. Including such differences (i.e., years of no or part-time work) in assessing the earnings returns to college quality demonstrated striking disadvantages facing college-educated Black men relative to White men, which were not fully accounted for by background characteristics. Employment and earnings returns to college quality were not as disparate by race for women. Relative to White women, we find earnings advantages for Hispanic women among those who attended community colleges. This article demonstrates the utility of taking an intersectional and life course approach to the study of higher education and the economic returns to schooling.

中文翻译：

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种族、性别、高等教育和社会经济成就：来自中年婴儿潮一代的证据


本文调查了白人、黑人和西班牙裔男性和女性进入大学的机会以及中年劳动力市场对大学质量的回归。为此，我们使用了 1979 年全国青年纵向调查 (NLSY-79) 的数据，并与巴伦招生竞争力指数中的大学质量信息合并。尽管之前的研究已经调查了接受高等教育的机会和回报方面的类似动态，但这项工作通常不包括西班牙裔，也没有评估黑人和西班牙裔入学人数往往集中的社区学院和其他竞争力较弱的大学的入学情况。我们发现，一旦我们考虑到学生背景的差异，黑人与白人和西班牙裔与白人在大学质量上的差异（对白人有利）就得到了充分解释或逆转。在中年时期，西班牙裔男性，尤其是黑人男性的劳动力参与率低于就读同等质量大学的白人男性。在评估大学质量的收入回报时考虑到这些差异（即多年没有工作或兼职工作）表明，受过大学教育的黑人相对于白人男性面临着显着的劣势，而这种劣势并没有完全由背景特征来解释。对于女性来说，大学质量的就业和收入回报并没有因种族而存在差异。相对于白人女性，我们发现就读社区大学的西班牙裔女性的收入优势。本文展示了采用交叉生命历程方法来研究高等教育和学校教育经济回报的实用性。