The United States has undergone two massive shifts in housing and schooling in the past 40 years. First, residential income segregation has markedly increased, especially among families with children. Second, postsecondary enrollment has greatly expanded, likely as a result of higher wages for college-educated workers. As these two secular trends have ascended side-by-side, a puzzle has emerged: Are families competing for neighborhoods that can ensure their children’s success in the college game? If so, are families increasingly hoarding geo-spatial opportunities to maximize their children’s socioeconomic success? To illuminate possible answers to these questions, I examine three successive cohorts of restricted data on students going to college in the early 1980s, the mid-2000s, and the late 2010s to understand whether the neighborhoods in which students grew up have increasingly differential impacts on their college enrollment and college selectivity outcomes. Using federally restricted geocoded data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and transcript data from the National Center for Educational Statistics, I track students from childhood and adolescence through young adulthood and find that the neighborhoods where they grew up indeed do have increasingly differential impacts on their college outcomes across these three cohorts of students. I discuss the potential implications for future economic disparities as increased competition for housing among families contracts students’ access to higher education.
Chair: Melinda Mills