Does Children’s Education Benefit from Mothers’ Overeducation? Evidence from China

• In Event: Sociology of Education Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 6. Familial Investments in Schooling

Abstract

Overeducation—when workers’ educational attainment exceeds job requirements—is typically framed as a form of human capital underutilization associated with wage penalties, job dissatisfaction, and psychological strain. Although research shows that overeducation is gendered and disproportionately affects women, little is known about its intergenerational consequences. This study examines whether maternal overeducation influences children’s educational attainment and whether such effects are stratified by mothers’ socioeconomic origins. We distinguish between voluntary overeducation, potentially chosen to facilitate work–family balance, and involuntary overeducation, arising from structural constraints. We propose a two-pathways model in which maternal family background shapes both the meaning of overeducation and its implications for children.

Using nationally representative panel data from the Chinese Family Panel Studies (CFPS), we follow children from compulsory schooling into early adulthood and estimate the causal effect of maternal overeducation on children’s likelihood of attaining a bachelor’s degree or above. We employ a debiased machine learning approach to nonparametric marginal structural models to estimate natural direct and indirect effects while flexibly adjusting for high-dimensional confounding.

Results show a modest but statistically significant positive effect: children of overeducated mothers are 5.5 percentage points more likely to enter higher education than their peers. Parenting practices mediate a small share (5.15%) of the total effect. However, effects are highly stratified by maternal origin SES. Among high-SES mothers, overeducation is associated with a 7.2 percentage-point increase in children’s college entry, whereas the corresponding estimate for low-SES mothers is 2.2 percentage points. Mediation through parenting is more pronounced among low-SES families.

By linking educational mismatch to intergenerational mobility, this study reframes overeducation as a family-level phenomenon whose consequences depend on social origins, contributing to research on stratification, gender, and human capital.

Authors

• Matthew Henglong Luo, University of Oxford

• Guanghui Pan, University of Oxford