Egalitarianism and the Returns to Education during the Great Transformation of American Education

Claudia Goldin

Scholarly Articles from Harvard University Department of Economics

Abstract: Secondary school education greatly expanded in the United States from 1910 to 1940, setting its schooling attainment apart from that of all other countries. Barely 10 percent of youth were high school graduates in 1910, but by the mid 1930s the median youth had a high school diploma. In some regions, by the 1930s enrollment and graduation rates rose to levels that were as high as they would be two decades later. The issue addressed here concerns the economic impact of the large increase in the supply of educated labor. Evidence is presented concerning the sharp decline in the wage premium to ordinary white†collar workers. With the expansion of the high school, large numbers of Americans competed for positions in the coveted white†collar sector. Although the return to a year of high school remained considerable on the eve of World War II, egalitarianism had evened the playing field for a substantial segment of Americans.

Date: 1999
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (61)

Published in Journal of Political Economy

Downloads: (external link)
http://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/2623652/Goldin_Egalitarianism.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Egalitarianism and the Returns to Education during the Great Transformation of American Education (1999)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hrv:faseco:2623652

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Scholarly Articles from Harvard University Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Office for Scholarly Communication ().