Cohorts and Socioeconomic Progress
by Dowell Myers
The following excerpt is from the report, Cohorts and Socioeconomic Progress, published by the Russell Sage Foundation and the Population Reference Bureau. This report is one of several in the new series, "The American People," which sets the results of Census 2000 in context and collectively provides a portrait of the American people in a new century. Each report is written by an author or team of authors selected for their expertise with the data and their broad understanding of the implications of demographic trends. For information on the series, go to www.prb.org/AmericanPeople. The full report is available through the PRB online store.
(December 2004) How best can we measure socioeconomic progress across decades? Why do many of us worry that young adults are failing to match the progress of their parents, or that immigrants are failing to get ahead in America? Often, two different dimensions of progress are at play. On the one hand, people typically achieve progress in their socioeconomic status as they move through their careers. At the same time, society progresses as each generation exceeds the achievements of its predecessors. The picture is often confused by skewed averages, however, when a major shift occurs in the makeup of society because there are more young people, or more immigrants, or more minorities. How much progress are people really experiencing?
The measurement of progress is best addressed by analysis of cohorts—groups of people passing through time together—observed in this report in decades from 1960 to 2000. Defined by shared year of birth, or by year of entry to the United States, cohorts' progress is traced in two important ways: over the lifetime, as socioeconomic status changes with passing time; and between cohorts, as one cohort replaces another at each life stage.
Between 1960 and 2000, the socioeconomic status among the elderly (ages 65 to 74) increased much more rapidly than among young adults (ages 25 to 34). Where once the elderly had a poverty rate twice as high as the young, by 1990, the poverty rate among the elderly was lower than the rate among the young. The elderly's homeownership advantages over the young also increased, especially from 1980 to 2000, and the elderly's educational disadvantage relative to the young rapidly narrowed. The growing status of the elderly reflects lifelong advantages, because a status such as educational attainment or homeownership is highly persistent over time.
A cohort’s status at ages 25 to 34 has great implications for the group's future well-being, because cohorts occupying that age group are launching into adult careers. For most of the 20th century, each cohort launched on higher and higher trajectories, but there was stagnation or decline on several indicators between 1980 and 1990. A crucial question to be answered from the 2000 Census is whether the decline observed at ages 25 to 34 across successive cohorts has continued or has reversed. Welcome evidence presented in this report reveals a resumption of progress, with strong increases in college completion and improvement in homeownership rates.
Rapid growth in the foreign-born population has obscured the socioeconomic progress for younger cohorts, especially among Latinos. Although it appears from the overall numbers that high school completion rates fell among Latinos, that decline is an artifact of growing numbers of immigrant arrivals. Among U.S.-born Latinos, high school completion actually increased 4 percentage points for recent cohorts. Similarly, college completion rates among U.S.-born Latinos also increased by nearly 5 percentage points.
Among the immigrants, cohort dynamics also reveal substantial socioeconomic progress in the 1990s. At first glance, immigrant poverty appears to have worsened, but when we disaggregate immigrants by year of arrival and trace those cohorts across decades, we draw a different conclusion: On average, immigrants have experienced sharp declines in poverty the longer they have resided in the United States. For example, among Latinos who arrived in the United States in the 1980s, poverty declined from 33 percent in 1990 to 22 percent in 2000. Steeper declines are observed among Asian immigrants.
The age of immigrants combines with their length of residence in shaping their trajectories into homeownership. Very sharp improvements are found among immigrant cohorts under age 45, and those who arrive later in life also have less time to reach as high an ultimate level of homeownership. Cohorts that arrive at very young ages never experience the dislocation of immigration, and those children grow up to achieve the highest rates of homeownership, with trajectories that track even higher than their U.S.-born counterparts.
The changing composition of the population obscures the socioeconomic progress experienced by the average person. Examining trends for specific cohorts within racial and ethnic groups provides a much more promising picture of actual progress in America. The rhetoric used to describe change needs to account for the different time dimensions of change revealed by an analysis of cohorts.
Dowell Myers is professor of urban planning and demography in the School of Policy, Planning, and Development at the University of Southern California.