Mobility Milestones: The Turning Points That Shape Who Gets Ahead
What if we could identify the specific moments in a young person’s life that predict whether they will move up the economic ladder, graduate from college, or enjoy good health as an adult?
That question is the focus of Mobility Milestones: Key Life Course Milestones Shaping Racial Mobility Gaps, the second report in Forward Change’s Striving and Thriving series on intergenerational mobility. Drawing on a comprehensive synthesis of research across education, income, and health, the report identifies 27 key milestones from birth through young adulthood that predict long-term trajectories. It then examines how racial disparities at each milestone help explain the mobility gaps documented in the first report in the series.
The findings paint a detailed picture of how advantage and disadvantage accumulate over a lifetime, and why racial gaps in mobility prove so difficult to close.
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The milestones: from cradle to career
The report organizes 27 milestones across three domains: education, income, and health. Many milestones influence more than one domain. Low birthweight, for example, predicts lower educational attainment, reduced adult earnings, and poorer health outcomes. Juvenile incarceration shapes trajectories in all three.
Some milestones are positive: attending quality preschool, earning strong grades, completing a bachelor’s degree, securing stable employment. Others are negative: elevated blood lead levels, chronic school absences, school suspensions, teenage parenthood. What unites them is evidence that each one predicts or causally shapes long-term outcomes, based on findings from longitudinal panel studies and multivariate analyses.
The milestones span the full arc of childhood and early adulthood. They begin at birth (low birthweight, early childhood development) and extend through the mid-30s (earnings growth, intragenerational income mobility). The report maps each one to an approximate age range and identifies which domains of mobility it affects. The result is a kind of developmental roadmap for intergenerational mobility: a set of critical junctures where trajectories are being shaped, for better or worse.
Education: where the gaps are largest and most persistent
Sixteen milestones were identified for educational mobility. The patterns are striking.
The most prevalent negative milestones are also the ones with the largest racial gaps. Consider reading and math proficiency. In 2022, between 79% and 85% of Black, American Indian, and Latino students scored below proficient in 4th grade reading and math on the NAEP. The racial gaps between these groups and White students ranged from 22 to 33 percentage points. These gaps appear early, persist through 8th and 12th grade, and predict high school graduation, college enrollment, and college completion.
School suspensions tell a parallel story. Between 29% and 67% of Black and American Indian students were suspended at some point between kindergarten and 12th grade, compared to far lower rates for White students, a gap of 28 percentage points. Suspensions predict lower educational attainment, and their prevalence has increased by 24% in recent years.
High school GPA (below 3.0) affects 57% to 65% of Black and Latino students. GPA is among the strongest predictors of college graduation, yet racial gaps in this milestone are substantial (32 percentage points) and trend data by race are unavailable.
Some milestones have improved over time. Juvenile incarceration rates fell 80% between 1997 and 2019. Juvenile arrest rates dropped 72% between 1995 and 2019. Grade retention declined 55% between 1994 and 2010, and teenage parenthood rates fell 81% between 1991 and 2022. These declines are meaningful. As prevalence falls, a milestone plays a smaller role in explaining population-level mobility gaps going forward.
But other trends are moving in the wrong direction. Chronic school absence rates surged 77% between 2015-16 and 2022-23, driven largely by the COVID-19 pandemic. The share of children not attending pre-K increased 17% between 2010 and 2018. And the racial disparity in low birthweight has persisted with little change (+3%) across four decades.
Income: the compounding cost of early disadvantage
Fifteen milestones were identified for income mobility. They predict adult employment, wages, household income, and intergenerational income mobility.
The high-prevalence milestones here are sobering. Between 73% and 86% of Black, American Indian, and Latino young adults (ages 25 to 34) lack a bachelor’s degree, a 32-percentage-point gap compared to Whites. Attending a selective or “high mobility” college, which is strongly associated with escaping poverty, remains out of reach for most: 89% to 90% of these students do not attend one, a 15-percentage-point gap. And 53% to 59% of Black and Latino workers lack stable full-time employment.
The evidence on college completion is important but complicated. A bachelor’s degree is one of the strongest predictors of higher earnings and upward income mobility. College graduation rates have risen for all groups: between 2005 and 2023, they increased by 61% for Blacks, 41% for American Indians, and 145% for Latinos. Yet the racial gap in degree completion (32 percentage points) has barely budged. Progress in absolute terms has not translated into relative progress.
Among the medium-prevalence milestones, young adult incarceration stands out. Affecting 12% to 16% of Black and American Indian young adults, with a 10-percentage-point racial gap, incarceration is a powerful predictor of reduced earnings and employment. Rates have declined 56% since 1991, but the racial disparity remains large.
Teenage parenthood again appears here, affecting 17% to 34% of Black and American Indian populations, though the evidence on its income effects is more equivocal. Some studies find earnings reductions for Baby Boomer and Gen X females, while others find that negative effects are limited to White females and those from higher-income counties.
Health: fewer milestones, persistent puzzles
Nine health mobility milestones were identified. They predict mental health, chronic health conditions, body mass index, self-rated health, and mortality.
The most notable finding may be the one with the fewest data points: not earning a bachelor’s degree (ages 25 to 34) was the only health milestone to fall into the high-prevalence range. The racial gap is 32 percentage points, and there has been little change over the past decade. This is a complicated marker, however, because of the “striving-thriving” paradox identified in the first report of this series. For young adults of color, obtaining a bachelor’s degree or experiencing upward educational mobility has been shown to predict increased allostatic load, metabolic syndrome, and even mortality, particularly for those from disadvantaged backgrounds. The same achievement that reduces health risk for White Americans may increase it for Black and Latino Americans.
Among medium-prevalence milestones, elevated blood lead levels (ages 0 to 5) and young adult incarceration showed the largest racial gaps, each at 10 percentage points. Elevated blood lead levels have declined 96% since 1991, one of the most dramatic improvements across all milestones. Adult incarceration has fallen 56% since 1991. But low birthweight has barely changed over four decades of effort, and long-term trend data for housing insecurity, juvenile delinquency, and downward intragenerational income mobility could not be determined.
Several health milestones had unclear prevalence: positive early childhood development, conscientiousness and high striving, and others lacked sufficient data to assess their current rates. This data gap itself matters. Without baseline prevalence data, it is difficult to know how much these factors contribute to racial gaps in health mobility or to track whether interventions are working.
What this adds up to
The report’s value lies in assembling these 27 milestones into a single, coherent picture. Taken together, they reveal several patterns worth highlighting.
First, the milestones with the highest prevalence and largest racial gaps tend to cluster in the education system. Below-proficient test scores, low GPAs, suspensions, and lack of preschool attendance affect enormous shares of Black, American Indian, and Latino youth. These are not obscure indicators. They are the bread-and-butter measures of how children move through school, and the gaps are large enough to explain a substantial portion of downstream mobility differences.
Second, some of the most promising trends involve milestones whose prevalence is declining. Juvenile incarceration, juvenile arrest, teenage parenthood, grade retention, and elevated blood lead levels have all fallen sharply. As these milestones become less common, their relative contribution to racial mobility gaps should shrink. But the remaining gaps in these areas are still racially disproportionate, and the milestones that are worsening or stagnant (chronic absence, low birthweight, lack of pre-K access) threaten to offset those gains.
Third, the health domain remains the most underdeveloped. Fewer milestones were identified, data gaps are more common, and the relationship between achievement and health for communities of color is paradoxical. The first report in this series showed that striving (upward educational and income mobility) may undermine thriving (health improvements) for Black and Latino Americans. This second report reinforces that concern: college completion, the single most important income mobility milestone, carries a complicated health profile for people of color.
Finally, the report makes clear that these milestones do not operate in isolation. Low birthweight can lead to developmental delays, which shape kindergarten readiness, which predicts reading scores, which predict high school graduation, which predicts college enrollment, which predicts adult earnings, which predicts health. The chain is long, and intervention at any link can alter the trajectory. But it also means that early disadvantages compound, and that communities facing disparities across multiple milestones simultaneously are fighting on many fronts at once.
Looking ahead
This report is the second in a three-part series. The first report documented the mobility gaps. This one identifies the 27 factors that help explain them. The third will describe 65 rigorously evaluated interventions that have proven effective in improving key mobility milestones for youth of color. Together, the three reports aim to move the conversation from documenting disparities to changing trajectories.
The full report, including detailed data tables, figures, and methodological notes, is available at www.fwdchange.org/strivingandthriving.
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