It is generally accepted that education is a powerful enabler of social mobility in the modern world. However, access to quality and specialized education is still highly unequal, creating pathways for some groups of people and barriers to others. This dissertation explores three approaches to understanding and addressing inequalities of opportunity in three separate chapters. The first chapter examines the importance of test design, in particular the time limit component, as a driver of gender gaps in performance. The second chapter evaluates the potential of a growth mindset intervention for narrowing gender gaps in challenge-seeking and competitive behavior. The third chapter investigates the educational attainment and labor market outcomes of an affirmative action policy for college admission that targets low-income and underrepresented racial minorities. Respective results show that changing the time limit of a test may increase female representation in competitive programs, teaching growth mindset may help some women become more challenge-seeking and competitive, and that affirmative action can more than double the chances of black low-income students entering a prestigious career without negatively impacting the prospects of students displaced by the policy. In summary, these studies provide evidence that informs the potential of an institution, a practice, and a policy to open pathways for more equitable opportunities in education and the labor market.

This dissertation discusses some of the causes and consequences of inequality, vertical and horizontal, some theoretically and others empirically. In doing so, I try to touch upon old and new themes in the economics literature, as old as rent seeking and as new as the effect of cultural norms.The first essay reflects on the inequality of opportunity as manifest in the quality of education available to families in India. The paper explores the relative roles of the quality of schools and household attributes on a household's choice of school in India. I find that income is the most important predictor of a household's choice of school, with a doubling of per capita income increasing the likelihood of choosing a private school over a public school by 10 percentage points. Public schools can rarely compete with private schools even with comparable infrastructure and free school supplies. As incomes rise (India's GDP has nearly doubled in the last 10 years), it is reasonable to expect that there will be de facto higher demand for private schooling and not public.The second essay is a theoretical examination of inequality-generating rent seeking and the feedback mechanism between the two. In this paper, I model rent seeking in an unequal endowment economy to analyze the conditions under which more inequality leads to more rent seeking. I find that, when rent-seeking costs are fixed, a more unequal economy fosters a greater proportion of rentiers. When rent-seeking costs are flexible, the proportion of rentiers shrinks with more inequality. However, both the quantity of rents per person and the resources wasted in pursuing rent-seeking activities increase.In the third essay, I link the education choices of women to gender-specific norms of marriage. Hypergamy (the practice of women "marrying up" by caste, age, education or any indicator of economic well-being) implies that too much education could lower women's prospects of finding a suitable spouse. To understand its impact on pre-marital investments in education, this project studies women's choice of educational attainment as a function of men's. To do so, I examine the impact of an exogenous change in the schooling level of men on the schooling level of women in the United States in the last 50 years. The source of variation is the change in US' immigration policy in 1965, which has been documented to have considerably altered the demography and skill pool in the US since 1965. I find evidence of a positive relationship between men and women's education outcomes. This is a result suggestive of hypergamy and its dragging effect on women's education. The result is robust to the use of another control group: immigrant women in the US.

The purpose of this book is to learn the relationship among education, productivity, income distribution, and economic growth, as well as to link the structure of the educational system to the economic and social character of the society. Essay 1 examines the equilibrium levels of public and private education in a model where public and private education can exist at the same time. There is no possibility for collapse of the public education system; however, the private education system will collapse in the long run if human capital grows faster in the public education sector than in the private education sector. Income inequality declines over time, and a heterogeneous economy becomes a homogeneous society in the long run. As long as income convergence exists in an economy, a balance growth path exists in the long run. Essay 2 investigates the effects of investment in education and the role of technical progress on economic growth in Taiwan in 1964 - 2000. Education provides a positive and significant effect on output growth in Taiwan, but the role of technical progress does not appear to be extraordinarily important.

Examines major myths informing American education and explores how educators can better serve students, increase college retention rates, and develop alternatives to college that don’t disadvantage students on the basis of race or income Each year, as the founding headmaster of the Boston Arts Academy (BAA), an urban high school that boasts a 94 percent college acceptance rate, Linda Nathan made a promise to the incoming freshmen: “All of you will graduate from high school and go on to college or a career.” After fourteen years at the helm, Nathan stepped down and took stock of her alumni: of those who went to college, a third dropped out. Feeling like she failed to fulfill her promise, Nathan reflected on ideas she and others have perpetuated about education: that college is for all, that hard work and determination are enough to get you through, that America is a land of equality. In When Grit Isn’t Enough, Nathan investigates five assumptions that inform our ideas about education today, revealing how these beliefs mask systemic inequity. Seeing a rift between these false promises and the lived experiences of her students, she argues that it is time for educators to face these uncomfortable issues head-on and explores how educators can better serve all students, increase college retention rates, and develop alternatives to college that don’t disadvantage students on the basis of race or income. Drawing on the voices of BAA alumni whose stories provide a window through which to view urban education today, When Grit Isn’t Enough helps imagine greater purposes for schooling.

Aage Sorensen was an influential intellectual presence who was one of the world's leading authorities on social stratification and the sociology of education. His research sought to understand the structures, dynamics and mechanisms that underlie inequalities in industrial societies by focusing on how individuals' attainments are shaped by characteristics of a society's or organization's opportunity structure, on the one hand, and individuals' education, experience and other human capital resources, on the other. He emphasized inequalities associated with education and schooling, class, and stratification outcomes such as income and occupational status. Within these general foci, he tackled the study of phenomena as diverse as rates of learning in elementary school reading groups and promotion patterns in large industrial corporations. The chapters of this volume illustrate some of the major themes that characterized Aage's research; these topics are also likely to constitute important concerns for future efforts to understand structured social inequality in society. These themes include: the development of explicit dynamic models to account for observed patterns of education, career, and labor market outcomes; aspects of educational inequality such as school effects and learning opportunities; issues related to intragenerational mobility and careers; and the role of rents in generating structural inequality.