The chances that a middle-class child will go to college are significantly reduced when the breadwinner of the family is laid off or fired, and black middle-class children are especially vulnerable to seeing their college aspirations derailed in such a manner, according to research findings presented in Washington at the annual conference of the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.
The involuntary loss of a job by the head of the household leaves middle-class white children six percentage points less likely to enroll in college, the researchers found. Middle-class black children, by comparison, are 19 percentage points less likely to enroll in college if the parent who was the breadwinner was laid off.
Two researchers at the University of Chicago — Ariel Kalil, an associate professor of public policy, and Patrick Wightman, a doctoral student in public policy — based their analysis on 23 years’ worth of data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, which has followed a nationally representative sample of families and their children since 1968. They focused on children born into families defined as middle class because their incomes were two to six times the poverty threshold (or, in 2005 dollars, $38,700 to $116,100 for a family of four).
To isolate parents who simply had trouble holding down a job — perhaps signaling personality traits that affect their parenting — the researchers limited their analysis to job losers who were 25 to 59 years old and had worked for the same place for more than a year, putting in at least 1,000 hours. About 22 percent of the white breadwinners and 26 percent of the black breadwinners in their analysis lost their jobs at some point during the years for which the researchers had data.
The researchers found that the single factor that best accounted for why parental job losses affected black and white children differently was how many years the children lived in a two-parent household. Other factors, such as accumulated family wealth, also appeared to play a role. “Black families, even in the middle class, are economically fragile and for some of these families, a job loss represents an economic catastrophe that ultimately affects the children’s educational futures,” the researchers’ report on their findings said. —Peter Schmidt
