Percent of Births to Unmarried Mothers by Education, 1970-2012

The United States does not currently invest heavily in vocational training compared with other countries, and funding for vocational training has declined over the past decades. The United States spends less than 0.05 percent of its gross domestic product on vocational training opportunities for workers.

This chart illustrates the cumulative risk of imprisonment for parents—or the projected lifetime likelihood of having served time for a person born in a specific year—by the time their child turns fourteen, by child's race and their own educational attainment. Regardless of race, fathers are much more likely to have been imprisoned than are mothers.

Nearly one out of two families in the struggling lower-middle class is headed by an adult who has attended college. Among household family heads with income between 100 and 250 percent of the FPL, 48 percent have attended some college, and 14 percent have a bachelor’s degree or higher. In stark contrast to those living at or below 250 percent of the FPL, 77 percent of household family heads above 250 percent of the FPL attended at least some college, and about half have a bachelor’s degree or higher.

In a new chart, The Hamilton Project shows the child food insecurity rates in every state in 2011.

The earnings of college graduates are much higher than for nongraduates, and that is especially true among people born into low-income families. As the figure shows, without a college degree a child born into a family in the lowest quintile has a 45 percent change of remaining in that quintile as an adult and only a 5 percent chance of moving into the highest quintile. 

One significant consequence of growing income inequality is that, by historical standards, high-income households are spending much more on their children’s education than low-income households. This figure shows enrichment expenditures—SAT prep, private tutors, computers, music lessons, and the like—by income level.