The Missing Key in Educational Transitions Research: Parental Assets and the Progression of Social Background Effects

• In Event: 30620 - Section on Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 2: Educational Trajectories and Inequality

Abstract

We comprehensively incorporate wealth into the educational transitions literature. Starting with Robert Mare’s work, countless studies over nearly five decades have examined how the effect of socioeconomic background on educational advancement evolves through successive educational transitions, generally finding that the effect wanes across transitions. Typically, this research has used parental income, education, or occupation to measure socioeconomic background. Wealth has been largely absent in this literature, and completely absent in the very small number of studies that go all the way to the latest educational transition: graduate degree completion. Using nationally representative data, we uncover the unique pattern of parental wealth effects across transitions. Whereas, in line with previous findings of waning effects, parental income and parental education have statistically insignificant effects on graduate degree completion, parental wealth has a positive effect on graduate degree completion that is statistically significant and greater than its effect on multiple prior transitions. We argue that parental assets’ unique pattern is theoretically expected, given the distinct intergenerational transmission dynamics that different socioeconomic factors exhibit over the life-course.

Authors

• Wesley Jeffrey, University of California-Merced

• Christian Michael Smith, University of Georgia

• Laura Theresa Hamilton, University of California-Merced