Prior research on trends in educational inequality has focused chiefly on changing gaps in educational attainment by family income or parental occupation. In contrast, this contribution provides the first assessment of trends in educational attainment by family wealth and suggests that we should be at least as much concerned about growing wealth…

Objectives: We aim to understand why blacks are significantly less likely than whites to perpetuate their middle class status across generations. To do so, we focus on the potentially different associations between parental job loss and youth's educational attainment in black and white middle class families. Methods: We use data from the Panel…

Job loss remains a permanent feature of the American economy. Black and white children may experience parental job loss differently, even when they share the same class location. We address this question using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), following those children "born" into the survey between 1968 and 1979 and followed…

This paper examines the extent to which family wealth affects the race-child achievement association for young children based on data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. We found little evidence that wealth mediates the black-white test scores gap. However, liquid assets, particularly holding in stocks and mutual funds, are positively…

Robert Schoeni and Karen Ross, in their chapter in "On the Frontier of Adulthood," examine several issues related to this material support: how much time and money youth receive from their parents between the ages of 18 and 34, the difference in support between high and low-income families, and the changing patterns of support over the last 30…