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Abstract:
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We link young people in the American Community Survey to their families' tax records while in high school, enabling an analysis of high school completion, college attendance, and college completion by family income for individuals born between 1985 and 1998 (who turned 18 between 2003 and 2016). Young people from low-income families increasingly completed high school throughout the period, narrowing the gap between the highest- and lowest-income quintiles by more than two-fifths. For cohorts born in the late 1980s (most of whom entered college prior to the Great Recession), high school graduates from low-income families increasingly attended college, narrowing the income gap in college attendance by nearly one-fifth. Notably, pre-recession college attendance gains do not coincide with increases in college completion among low-income students. Post-recession, gaps in college enrollment and completion held steady. We find a more modest decline in the income gap in college attendance than that published by NCES (using Current Population Survey data).
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