The climb

This part follows young people from school discipline through college to adult income and asks whether one neighborhood offers the same opportunity to everyone who grows up in it. Where the data allow, it compares groups of children inside the same district or the same tract, which removes the differences between neighborhoods that a county or ZIP code average mixes in. Every chapter describes places and groups of children, and none follows an individual child.

Chapter 3.1, School discipline and incarceration starts with exclusion from school. Suspensions, expulsions, referrals to law enforcement and arrests at school are all more common in the most deprived districts than in the least deprived, and Black students are suspended at higher rates than white students in the same district. The chapter then moves from districts to census tracts and compares Black and white children from low-income families raised in the same tract on incarceration in adulthood. The two parts of the chapter describe different cohorts of children and no child is followed from a suspension to a later incarceration, so each part reports how unevenly an outcome falls across places and groups, and neither tests the other. A final section reviews evidence on whether suspension and detention change later outcomes.

Chapter 3.2, College access, price and earnings follows the climb to college, with the institution as the unit for earnings and price and the county as the unit for distance. It compares the median earnings of former students who received federal aid across for-profit, public and private nonprofit colleges, shows how the net price a family pays varies with family income, in dollars and as a share of that income, and asks how far the residents of a county live from the nearest four-year college. That distance rises with county deprivation and with rurality. The earnings describe aided students from earlier entering classes, not all students and not those entering now, and a pattern across colleges is not a statement about what a college does for a student.

Chapter 3.3, Race, income and mobility holds the tract fixed. White children from low-income families reach a higher adult income rank than Black children from low-income families raised in the same tract, in most of the tracts where both are estimated. The chapter applies the same comparison to the advantage of a higher-income family and to Black and white life expectancy inside the same county, and it asks what predicts upward mobility across counties, among them friendships that cross income lines. A same-tract comparison removes differences between neighborhoods and leaves other differences, such as family wealth and schooling, so the gap is a residual that the data describe without explaining. A box reports designs that test whether moving to another place changes a child's own outcome.

Chapter 3.4, Teen births uses the Opportunity Atlas to compare the predicted share of women who had a teen birth, for women born in 1978 to 1983 to low-income parents, across the tracts where they grew up. The share is higher in more deprived tracts, and inside the same tract Black and Hispanic women's predicted shares exceed white women's by a gap that shows no detectable change across deprivation. The measure describes births in the 1990s and early 2000s and not teen births today. Chapter 3.5, Boys and mobility (planned) will ask whether boys and girls raised in the same neighborhoods reach different incomes as adults, and where that gap is widest.