U.S. Educational Mobility in the Early Twentieth Century
E&I Cluster Workshop, November 11, 12:00, MCNB 367
Please join us for a talk by Shariq Mohammed, Northeastern and Paul Mohnen, Penn, who will discuss their paper, “U.S. Educational Mobility in the Early Twentieth Century” (with Martha J. Bailey).
This paper characterizes the geography of intergenerational educational mobility for early-20th century cohorts and its local correlates. The authors use supervised machine-learning to link 1.7 million men and women in the Social Security Application Records to the full-count 1940 Census.
The authors will show that the geography of educational mobility was broadly similar to the geography of income mobility, with the highest rates of mobility in the Northeast and the West of the country and the lowest rates of mobility in the South. High-mobility counties were characterized by: (i) lower income inequality, (ii) higher literacy rates of parents, (iii) greater economic development, and (iv) higher local public expenditures. Both the geography and the correlates of educational mobility were similar for men and women born in the early 20th century. (Please register for the Friday E&I Cluster Workshop Zoom link at https://web.sas.upenn.edu/education-and-inequality-workshop/ if you prefer to join by Zoom.)