As the fall semester comes to a close, we’re reflecting on what we’ve accomplished over the past year. In the first half of 2024, we released four reports examining the current state of educational and economic opportunity in the United States. These reports explored crucial topics, including postsecondary education’s holistic benefits, employment realities in rural America, the changing demographics at selective and open-access institutions, and whether the middle-skills credentials awarded by providers align with the needs of local labor markets. In this post, we’re recapping our findings for those who may have missed them.
Learning and Earning by Degrees explores the substantial benefits of rising college degree attainment between 2010 and 2020. A 6.7 percentage point increase in college degree attainment over the period will ultimately lead to $14.2 trillion in additional net lifetime earnings for US workers. However, the trends in higher education over that decade also reinforced racial/ethnic and gender gaps in educational attainment and earnings. For example, while gaps between white adults and Hispanic/Latino and multiracial adults in degree attainment narrowed slightly between 2010 and 2020, disparities widened between white adults and American Indian/Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander, and Black/African American adults. Gender disparities combined with racial/ethnic inequities to tell a similar story. Within nearly all racial/ethnic groups, women’s college attainment surpasses men’s, yet men continue to outearn women within the same racial/ethnic groups at every degree level.
If adults of all races/ethnicities had degree attainment at least as high as that of white adults, the nation’s workers would accrue an additional $11.3 trillion in net lifetime earnings on top of the $14.2 trillion they are already set to gain. Beyond higher earnings, the report also details many nonmonetary benefits associated with postsecondary education, such as longer life expectancy, lower rates of disease, lower levels of incarceration, higher resistance to authoritarianism, and higher levels of civic participation.
Small Towns, Big Opportunities uses a good jobs framework to explore the narrative that rural localities have been “left behind.” When the cost-of-living differences between rural and urban areas are taken into account, 7.4 million workers ages 25–64 in rural America have good jobs paying at least middle-class wages. In fact, working adults in rural America are almost as likely (50 percent) as working adults in urban America (54 percent) to have a good job. Additionally, workers with lower levels of educational attainment actually fare better in rural areas than in urban ones, in part due to rural America’s particularly strong blue-collar economy.
Despite these rays of light, rural America faces challenges: 2010–20 was the first decade in American history in which the population of rural areas declined, and that trend will not be easily reversed. Racial/ethnic and gender disparities in rural America can also be stark. White workers are the only racial/ethnic group in rural America in which the majority of workers have good jobs. Likewise, women suffer from greater economic inequality in rural communities due to wage segregation, occupational segregation, and labor-force nonparticipation. Our report advocates for increased investment in education, training, and counseling to better support rural workers and attempt to address these challenges.
Progress Interrupted demonstrates that the US is still far from successfully closing equity gaps by race/ethnicity at selective universities. Even with race-conscious affirmative action, diversity gains made at these universities between 2009 and 2019 were incremental at best.
In 2019, American Indian/Alaska Native, Black/African American, and Hispanic/Latino students made up 37 percent of the college-age population but only 21 percent of enrollments at selective colleges. Specifically, Hispanic/Latino enrollment at selective colleges had increased by 50,000, nearly doubling over ten years, while Black/African American enrollment had risen by just 5,000 and American Indian/Alaska Native enrollment had declined. In contrast, white and Asian American/Pacific Islander students represented 60 percent of the college-age population and 73 percent of selective college enrollments in 2019. Despite a 12 percent decrease in the white college-age population from 2009 to 2019, white students’ enrollment at selective colleges remained stable; meanwhile, Asian American/Pacific Islander students saw a 34 percent increase in selective enrollment alongside a 55 percent increase in the college-age population.
As a whole, students from marginalized racial/ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds continue to be underrepresented at selective institutions and overrepresented at open-access colleges, where they face poorer outcomes and lower graduation rates. Early insights into post-affirmative action enrollment data for the class of 2028 at top schools like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Brown University reveal a continuation of this trend, indicating an urgent need for dual-edged reform that expands access at selective colleges and improves outcomes at their open-access counterparts.
The Great Misalignment examines the extent to which middle-skills providers are awarding certificates and associate’s degrees in fields that align with local workforce needs. Roughly 30 percent of annual job openings through 2031 will go to workers with a middle-skills credential (a certificate or associate’s degree) or some college but no degree, but the current distribution of middle-skills credentials across programs of study differs significantly from the expected distribution of job openings for workers with these credentials.
Credentials-to-jobs alignment is strongest when middle-skills education and training are delivered by a mix of institutions serving different needs. As a result, urban areas have stronger credentials-to-jobs alignment than rural areas because of their larger number of providers. Geography also plays a significant role in racial/ethnic gaps in access to middle-skills providers with strong credentials-to-jobs alignment. For example, American Indian/Alaska Native adults are four times as likely as working-age adults in other racial/ethnic groups to live in an area with no middle-skills service provider. In contrast, among working-age adults with local access to at least one middle-skills provider, 73 percent of Black/African American adults live in communities with relatively strong credentials-to-jobs alignment, the highest proportion of any racial/ethnic group.
Together, these reports make clear that while the US has made strides toward improving access to opportunity in higher education and employment, significant roadblocks persist. From the rising educational tide that lifts populations unevenly to persistent equity gaps at the nation’s top universities, and from the compelling need for increased investment in rural education to the urgent call for middle-skills credentials that meet labor-market needs, our reports shed light on trends and disparities that endure across both demographic and geographic fault lines. They also suggest policy strategies and practical solutions that would advance equitable access to educational and economic opportunity in the US.
In our next post, we’ll revisit our busy summer and fall…. stay tuned!
