Exploring the impact of parental education on adults’ skills with PIAAC

• In Event: Poster session 2

Proposal

Purpose
This session will use data from the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) to examine the impact of parental education on the skills development of their children throughout their adult lives across several countries. In addition, the relationship between parental education and other variables including workforce participation, educational attainment, and social outcomes will be explored by several demographic characteristics.

Context
Previous research has found that family members are one of the most influential sources in U.S. high school students plans for education and career after high school (Oymak, 2018). Internationally, a strong impact of parents education on their children’s outcomes has also been found. For example, parents’ educational attainment is a much stronger predictor of an individual’s own educational attainment than other demographics such as age or gender. Further, 69% of non-student adults (30-44 year-olds) who do not have a parent with a college degree or higher have not completed tertiary education, compared to only 31% of those who have a college-educated parent (OECD, 2017). This session will look in more detail at the association between parental education and adults’ outcomes, to see how the patterns vary by demographics and across countries, and to examine what factors have the strongest association with the maintenance of inequalities by parental education into adulthood.

Data Source & Methods
This session will use data from 30 countries and nearly 200,000 participants that participated in PIAAC in 2012 and 2014. It will use the combined 2012/2014 U.S. data that includes the supplemental data the U.S. collected in 2014. Each country administered PIAAC to a nationally representative sample of at least 5,000 adults between the ages of 16 and 65. PIAAC assessed skills in the areas of literacy, numeracy, and digital problem solving and included an extensive background survey that collected critical information about participants’ own education, parents’ education, home environment, income, work status/history, health, and several other areas.

This research will use descriptive statistics to look at the relationship between parental education and the literacy and numeracy skill levels of adults and educational and employment outcomes. These relationships also be examined by demographic characteristics including age, gender, and nativity.

Results/Conclusions

Results from this study include:

Internationally, adults whose parents have not completed high school have significantly lower literacy skills than those whose parents have. The literacy skills gap between those with low parental education (those whose parents have not completed high school) and those with high parental education (those with a parent with a college degree) is largest in the United States, Chile, Germany, Israel, Poland, and Singapore. This gap is smallest in countries including Cyprus, Lithuania, Estonia, Greece, Ireland, Japan, New Zealand, Sweden, and Turkey.

On average across countries, a significantly greater percentage (68%) of adults with high parental education are employed compared to those with low parental education (64%).

Similar trends of adults with high parental education having significantly higher skill levels compared to those with lower education can be found across demographics including by age, gender, and whether they were born in the country.

Significance
These findings will provide detailed data on the relationship between parental education and adult’s outcomes to policymakers, with an insight to developing policies and programs that may help break a cycle of disadvantage across generations and increase social mobility. This may include developing programs that will focus on improving outcomes of students from disadvantaged backgrounds while they are still in schooling, but these findings also show that inequalities persist throughout the lifespan so opportunities for disadvantaged adults to catch up later on are necessary.

Authors

• Emily Pawlowski, American Institutes for Research

• Jaleh Soroui, American Institutes for Research