EDUCATION OF AMERICAN YOUTH: A COHORT-BASED PERSPECTIVE

在世纪的大部分时间里， 妇女的受教育水平也在稳步提高。这一趋势突然停止 1950年以后出生的人。这个研究项目的目标是了解 婴儿潮一代未能保持这一趋势的原因， 前几代人，并分析劳动力市场的影响， 受教育程度下降。普查和当前人口调查数据 这些数据集可用于记录各年龄组的教育趋势， 对1950年后经济放缓的其他解释。可能的解释 包括高等教育的经济回报的变化， 儿童的人口和家庭背景特点， 不同形式高等教育的可获得性和费用， 影响高等教育质量和可获得性的规模，以及 兵役要求和退伍军人教育计划的变化。 将通过比较随时间的变化来评估替代解释 在不同的州，也通过比较美国的趋势， 加拿大，英国，和德国，人口趋势和劳动力市场 情况有些不同。世界经济转型的影响 将使用需求模型分析教育的跨队列趋势 明确承认不完全替代性的劳动力市场的一方 不同教育程度但不同年龄的工人之间的差异。相对工资 大学与高中工人的比例将与特定年龄组有关， 经济范围内受过高等教育的劳动力的相对供给。模特们会很合身 美国的数据，加拿大的数据，英国的数据，和德国，探索 相对供给变化在工资差距扩大中的作用。

Over most of the 20th century successive generations of young men and women had steadily rising levels of education. This trend halted abruptly for cohorts born after 1950. The goal of this research project is to understand the reasons for the failure of baby-boom cohorts to maintain the trend set by previous generations, and to analyze the labor market implications of the slowdown in educational attainment. Census and Current Population Survey data sets win be used to document trends in education across cohorts, and evaluate alternative explanations for the post-1950 slowdown. Potential explanations include changes in the economic return to higher education, shifts in the demographic and family background characteristics of children, changes in the accessibility and cost of different forms of higher education, shifts in cohort size that influence the quality and availability of higher education, and changes in military service requirements and veteran education programs. Alternative explanations will be evaluated by comparing changes over time within different states, and also by comparing trends in the U.S. to trends in Canada, the U.K., and Germany, where demographic trends and labor market conditions have been somewhat different. The implications of a shift in the inter-cohort trend in education will be analyzed using models for the demand side of the labor market that explicitly recognize imperfect substitutability between workers of a given education level but different ages. Relative wages of college versus high school workers will be related to age-group specific and economy-wide relative supplies of highly educated labor. The models will be fit to U.S. data, and to data for Canada, the U.K., and Germany, to explore the role of relative supply changes in the observed widening of wage differentials.