The World of Higher Education The Widening Gap: Income, College, and Opportunity with Zachary Bleemer
Sep 25, 2025
Zachary Bleemer, an Assistant Professor of Economics at Princeton and a researcher focused on higher education and social mobility, joins the discussion. He reveals startling findings that the dream of higher education as a social elevator has stagnated since the 1960s. Bleemer breaks down the sharp decline in wage benefits for low-income students compared to their wealthier counterparts. He explores systemic inequalities in educational institutions and suggests policy reforms aimed at supporting underfunded community colleges for better outcomes.
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College's Equalizing Power Has Fallen
- Early 20th-century college attendance gave low- and high-income students similar wage gains after college.
- By the 2000s, college benefits for high-income students grew to more than double those for low-income students.
A Century Of Linked Surveys Makes The Study
- The authors combined many retrospective and longitudinal surveys to create a century-long dataset linking parental background to later wages.
- They used linked census records, Project Talent, NLSY and similar surveys to follow students into their 30s.
Early Data Required Income Proxies
- Pre-1950 surveys often lacked direct parental income measures and used parental occupation, education, and industry as proxies.
- The paper devotes effort to aligning different-quality measures to avoid mismeasurement driving results.