Date and Time: 9:30 AM – 10:30 AM, Friday, April 21, 2023

Venue: IB 1050

Zoom: 94339428092

Title: Changes in the College Mobility Pipeline Since 1900

Speaker: Dr. Sarah Quincy, Assistant Professor in the economics department at Vanderbilt University

Host: Dr. Camila Saez Müller, Assistant Professor of Economics at Duke Kunshan University

Abstract: The observational wage return to college has relatively declined for lower-income college graduates over the past 100 years, signaling a potential weakening of higher education’s contribution to economic mobility in the U.S. We investigate this phenomenon by bringing together administrative student, faculty, and curriculum records spanning the 20th century. In contrast to the rising returns to college, university educational activities have changed relatively little over time. Newly-linked administrative and survey data on measured academic aptitude do not suggest that changing selection patterns into college-going explain the observed relative decline. While changes in institution selection and major-specific returns both play important roles, we find striking changes in the latter since the 1930s. Lower-income students have gone from over- to under-represented in high-return college majors like engineering, meaningfully limiting American universities’ mobility potential.

Biography: Sarah Quincy is an Assistant Professor in the economics department at Vanderbilt University. She received a Ph.D. in economics from University of California, Davis in 2019. She is an economic historian working on macroeconomic and financial topics in the 20th century United States.  Her research has appeared in the Journal of Economic History, AEA Papers and Proceedings, and the Journal of Urban Economics.