Continuing Education and Stratification at Midlife.

We ask whether patterns of racial/ethnic and socioeconomic stratification in educational attainment are amplified or attenuated when we take a longer view of educational careers. We propose a model of staged advantage to understand how educational inequalities evolve over the life course. Distinct from cumulative advantage, staged advantage asserts that inequalities in education ebb and flow over the life course as the population at risk of making each educational transition changes along with the constraints they confront in seeking more education. Results based on data from the 2014 follow-up of the sophomore cohort of High School and Beyond offer partial support for our hypotheses. The educational attainment process was far from over for our respondents as they aged through their 30s and 40s: more than six of ten continued their formal training during this period and four of ten earned an additional credential. Patterns of educational stratification at midlife became more pronounced in some ways, as women pulled further ahead of men in their educational attainments and parental education (but not income), and high school academic achievement continued to shape educational trajectories at the bachelor's degree level and beyond. However, African American respondents gained on White respondents during this life phase through continued formal (largely academic) training and slightly greater conditional probabilities of graduate or professional degree attainment; social background fails to predict earning an associate degree. These results, showing educational changes and transitions far into adulthood, have implications for our understanding of the complex role of education in stratification processes.

Is Two Too Many? Parity and Mothers' Labor Force Exit.

OBJECTIVE: How do women's chances of labor force exit vary by the number of children they have? BACKGROUND: Conventional wisdom suggests there may be a tipping point at the second child when women are particularly likely to leave. Women who only ever have one child, by contrast, are thought to be uniquely unlikely to exit. METHOD: Using data from the nationally representative 1979-2012 waves of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (https://www.nlsinfo.org/content/cohorts/nlsy79), event history methods estimate the likelihood of labor force exit as women progress across parity transitions. RESULTS: Results show no evidence for a tipping point around the birth of second children. Women are instead most likely to leave the labor force when they are pregnant with their first child and each subsequent child is associated with a smaller increase in the probability of exit. In addition, women who only ever have one child are less likely to leave the labor force than those who have more children and these differences arise as early as their pregnancies with their first children. College-educated women who only ever have one child are especially unlikely to exit. CONCLUSION: Findings thus do not support the second child tipping point hypothesis, but they emphasize the importance of completed parity and the transition to motherhood for mothers' labor force behavior.

Which Mothers Pay a Higher Price? Education Differences in Motherhood Wage Penalties by Parity and Fertility Timing.

Upon becoming mothers, women often experience a wage decline-a "motherhood wage penalty." Recent scholarship suggests the penalty's magnitude differs by educational attainment. Yet education is also predictive of when women have children and how many they have, which can affect the wage penalty's size too. Using fixed-effects models and data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979, I estimate heterogeneous effects of motherhood by parity and by age at births, considering how these relationships differ by education. For college graduates, first births were associated with a small wage penalty overall, but the penalty was larger for earlier first births and declined with higher ages at first birth. Women who delayed fertility until their mid-thirties reaped a premium. Second and third births were associated with wage penalties. Less educated women instead faced a wage penalty at all births and delaying fertility did not minimize the penalty.

What Skills Can Buy: Transmission of advantage through cognitive and noncognitive skills.

Parental income and wealth contribute to children's success but are at least partly endogenous to parents' cognitive and noncognitive skills. We estimate the degree to which mothers' skills measured in early adulthood confound the relationship between their economic resources and their children's postsecondary education outcomes. Analyses of NLSY79 suggest that maternal cognitive and noncognitive skills attenuate half of parental income's association with child baccalaureate college attendance, a fifth of its association with elite college attendance, and a quarter of its association with bachelor's degree completion. Maternal skills likewise attenuate a third of parental wealth's association with children's baccalaureate college attendance, half of its association with elite college attendance, and a fifth of its association with bachelor's degree completion. Observational studies of the relationship between parents' economic resources and children's postsecondary attainments that fail to account for parental skills risk seriously overstating the benefits of parental income and wealth.