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Title: THE BABY BOOM AND EDUCATIONAL ATTAINMENT

Citation Type: Miscellaneous

Publication Year: 2019

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Abstract: High school and college graduation rates abruptly stagnated among cohorts born in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Previous research has attributed some of this reversal in trends to an abnormally high college completion rate for men born in the 1940s due to the Vietnam War. We add a new explanation for the surprising changes in educational attainment among these cohorts — the baby boom. We use the Health and Retirement Survey to estimate birth order effects for the baby boom generation and combine our estimated coefficients with birth order data from Vital Statistics to show that changes in birth order can explain more than 20 percent of the decline in white male college graduation rates during the baby boom. Combining the effects of birth order and cohort size, the baby boom can explain more than a third of the decline in college completion of white men, and the collapse of the baby boom can explain more than half of the rebound among the 1960–1974 cohorts.


Url: http://www.eh.net/eha/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/HandyShester.pdf

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Authors: Handy, Christopher; Shester, Katharine, L

Publisher: Washington and Lee University

Data Collections: IPUMS USA

Topics: Education

Countries: United States