ArticleSocial forces; a scientific medium of social study and interpretation2015
How Has Educational Expansion Shaped Social Mobility Trends in the United States?
Article in Social forces; a scientific medium of social study and interpretation, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 17 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
17 citing papers in PubMed.
- Global Inequality of Opportunity in Education Decreased During the 20th Century.The British journal of sociology · 2026Article
- Meritocratic beliefs in the United States, Finland, and China: A multidimensional approach using latent class analysis.The British journal of sociology · 2025Article
- Zoom out: An intervention on the virtual learning environment improves minority students' grades in two field experiments in Israel.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- The gap-closing estimand: A causal approach to study interventions that close disparities across social categories.Sociological methods & research · 2024Article
- Social Background Effects on Educational Outcomes-New Insights from Modern Genetic Science.Kolner Zeitschrift fur Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie · 2024Article
- Black-White Differences in Offspring Educational Attainment and Older Parents' Dementia.Journal of health and social behavior · 2023Article
- Moving Away from One's Origins: Predictors of Becoming a First-Generation College Graduate and Not Becoming a Continuing-Generation Graduate.The Sociological quarterly · 2023Article
- Does Increasing the Minimum School-Leaving Age Affect the Intergenerational Transmission of Education? Evidence from Four European Countries.European sociological review · 2022Article
- Impact of the 2008 Recession on Wealth-Adjusted Income and Inequality for U.S. Cohorts.The journals of gerontology. Series B, Psychological sciences and social sciences · 2022Article
- The Relationship Between Social Mobility Belief and Learning Engagement in Adolescents: The Role of Achievement Goal Orientation and Psychological Capital.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- Invited Commentary: Societal Constraints and Individual Agency: Navigating Educational Transitions for Upward Mobility.Journal of youth and adolescence · 2021Article
- Reconsidering the 'meritocratic power of a college degree'.Research in social stratification and mobility · 2020Article
- The impact of the Great Recession on Generation X.Longitudinal and life course studies : international journal · 2019Article
- Growing Wealth Gaps in Education.Demography · 2018Article
- Relative Education and the Advantage of a College Degree.American sociological review · 2018Article
- Socioeconomic differences in overweight and weight-related behaviors across adolescence and young adulthood: 10-year longitudinal findings from Project EAT.Preventive medicine · 2016Article
- A New Infrastructure for Monitoring Social Mobility in the United States.The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science · 2015Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
Abstract
This contribution provides a long-term assessment of intergenerational social mobility trends in the United States across the 20th and early 21st century and assesses the determinants of those trends. In particular, we study how educational expansion has contributed to the observed changes in mobility opportunities for men across cohorts. Drawing on recently developed decomposition methods, we empirically identify the contribution of each of the multiple channels through which changing rates of educational participation shape mobility trends. We find that a modest but gradual increase in social class mobility can nearly exclusively be ascribed to an interaction known as the compositional effect, according to which the direct influence of social class backgrounds on social class destinations is lower among the growing number of individuals attaining higher levels of education. This dominant role of the compositional effect is also due to the fact that, despite pronounced changes in the distribution of education, class inequality in education has remained stable while class returns to education have shown no consistent trend. Our analyses also provide a cautionary tale about mistaking increasing levels of social class mobility for a general trend towards more fluidity in the United States. The impact of parental education on son's educational and class attainment has grown or remained stable, respectively. Here, the compositional effect pertaining to the direct association between parental education and son's class attainment counteracts a long-term trend of increasing inequality in educational attainment tied to parents' education.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.