For generations, America has been thought of as the land of opportunity, a place where anyone who worked and studied hard could grow up to achieve any goal they set for themselves.

That idea has had especially strong roots in Illinois, the “Land of Lincoln,” where a young man born in a log cabin on America’s frontier rose from rail-splitter to self-taught lawyer and president of the United States.

But a new study suggests that the American dream is still more elusive for some people in Illinois than for others, and that the pathway up the economic ladder is not easily scaled.

The study, entitled “Precarious Prospects,” tracked a cohort of millennials from Illinois – more than 340,000 students from the senior classes of 2008-2012 – from graduation, through their post-secondary careers and into young adulthood.

The study was a joint project conducted by the Illinois Workforce and Education Research Collaborative, or IWERC, the Discovery Partners Institute, the University of Illinois, and the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research.

It found that educational attainment is still a strong predicter of a person’s future earnings as an adult. So too is the industry that a person chooses for a career.

Other factors can also influence a person’s ability to complete a higher education degree, including their race, ethnicity and gender.

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Class-based barriers

The study also found that a person’s own economic background – whether they grew up rich or poor – also strongly influences their future earnings. Students who grew up in higher-income households tended to earn more than those who grew up in lower-income families, in part because students from higher-income families were more likely to complete a college degree than lower-income students.

But perhaps most surprisingly, the study found that even among those who earn similar degrees and go to work in similar industries, a student’s own economic background influenced their future earnings. That is, students from lower-income families tend to earn less than those from wealthier families, even after they went on to earn similar credentials.

Further, the study found, among students from lower-income families, Black and Latino students and women tended to earn less than their white and male counterparts.

“The racial and gender disparities obviously are real, and there’s a lot of research showing that, but I don’t think it’s all that’s going on,” Sarah Cashdollar, associate director of IWERC and a lead author of the report, said in a podcast interview with Capitol News Illinois.

“One thing is that the same degree, such as a bachelor’s degree, can have a very different payoff depending on the college that the student went to,” she said. “And there’s research that’s found students from higher income families are more likely to go to colleges that have things like many internship opportunities or other work-based learning. More advising, more networking opportunities. And for some fields, those things are essential to landing a good job.”

“There’s also research showing that higher income students have greater access to social networks in general that can provide those connections,” she said.

Education and career choice

Among all the factors the study examined, educational attainment had by far the largest impact on a person’s future earnings. It found there was a gap of nearly $40,000 a year in earnings for someone with an advanced degree compared to someone with only a high school diploma.

The study also found that regardless of what type of degree or credential a person earns, the industry in which they work has a big impact on their future earnings.

“For certificates and associate’s degrees, we see higher earnings for construction, for mechanic and repair technologies,” Cashdollar said. “So these are things like auto mechanics, HVAC techs, electricians, and also precision production. … These are all areas that tend to have unions, and they also have been experiencing higher demand due to lower supply in recent years, and so there’s some upward wage pressure in those in those occupations.”

“And then for the bachelor’s, there are many, many industries that offer higher earnings,” she said. “Two of the highest earnings were engineering and computer and information sciences.”

But the gaps between people with similar degrees from different economic backgrounds was still significant – $3,753 annually for those with less than a bachelor’s degree, and $5,028 for those with a bachelor’s degree or higher.

Still to come

The Precarious Prospects study was the first of a two-part research project made possible through a data sharing partnership between the Illinois Department of Employment Security, the Illinois Student Assistance Commission, the Illinois State Board of Education and Illinois State University.

Cashdollar said the second phase of the project, due to be published later this year, will focus on those students who manage to succeed in climbing the economic ladder, despite the barriers they face.

“To give a preview, we found that there were pathways at all levels of education toward higher earning careers, but they were predominantly concentrated in bachelor’s degree pathways and even higher masters and doctoral and professional (programs).”

Capitol News Illinois is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service that distributes state government coverage to hundreds of news outlets statewide. It is funded primarily by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation.