Carolina Milesi, Principal Investigator
2009

This study compares the educational trajectories of students from two different cohorts: one that attended college mainly in the 1980s, and a more recent cohort that started attending college around 2000 and has continued doing so throughout the decade. Throughout this period, there have been substantive changes in the postsecondary landscape, including an increase in the proportion of youth attending college, a substantial rise in the cost of college, an expansion of two-year colleges, and an increase in alternative pathways to completing college.

Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 and the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997, this project describes how the process of college enrollment, college persistence, and college completion have changed over this period and assesses whether, as a result of these different trajectories, socioeconomic and racial and ethnic disparities have increased, decreased, or remained the same.