Measuring Elite Capture of the Education Earnings Premium: The Carnoy Index

One of the leading reasons behind social inequities is that elite groups have had access to more widespread and higher-quality educational opportunities much earlier, often when their economic returns were much higher. Nonetheless, inequality metrics tend to focus exclusively on contemporary differences in educational attainment or on learning gaps within the school-age population. This paper proposes a new measure –- the Carnoy index -– that captures historical and contemporary differences in the access to the economic returns of education across different groups. Concretely, the Carnoy index is the share of the cumulative education earnings premium accrued by the elite over time in excess to that accrued by other groups. The paper advances a methodology to compute the index using household survey data, and illustrates its applications by computing it along wealth, race and gender, within primary, secondary and post-secondary education, for twelve countries and territories with compatible data (1980–2011; N = 261 million). We showcase the new insights that the Carnoy index brings relative to other measures when it comes to understanding educational inequities and informing policies to address them.