Hidden Advantage along the Pipeline: Family Wealth and Educational Transitions from High School through Graduate School

Research shows a link between wealth and educational attainment, but little work has examined wealth relationships from high school degree through graduate degree completion. We use data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 to study when and how wealth may advantage students along their entire educational trajectory. Using sequential logistic regression models (“Mare models”), we find that across transitions, wealth relationships are separate from income and parental education relationships. As observed for other socioeconomic dimensions, wealth relationships decrease at the transition to graduate school entry. However, we show that the wealth relationship substantially increases at the graduate degree completion transition, running counter to the waning pattern found for family income and parental education. We also reveal that, like other socioeconomic dimensions, these wealth relationships partially attenuate when we include early indicators of academic performance differentials. Our findings thus shed new light on the nature of wealth-based educational inequality in the United States.