The Impact of Parental Divorce on Educational Attainment: Variation Over Time and by Parental Education

• In Event: Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): 2. Inequality and Education

Abstract

Parental divorce has been found to have negative impacts on children’s educational attainment. However, further research has discovered sources of heterogeneity in the impacts of parental divorce or other family structure variation by social context and family characteristics that could lead to changes in the association over time. As the U.S. has seen a general expansion in divorce and decline in divorce stigma over the 20th century, the impact of divorce on educational attainment could be weakened over time as the normative expectations around marriage and two-parent biological households have also weakened. Heterogeneity by family background may also explain variation over time, as research suggests that high SES children are more adversely affected by parental divorce than low SES children. As more recent cohorts experience uneven declines in divorce rates, with the college-educated experiencing larger decreases in divorce than the low-educated, this could decrease the effect of parental divorce by concentrating it among the low-educated who are less affected by parental divorce. In contrast, the expansion of the college-educated population over time could have an offsetting effect, increasing the pool of potential divorcees even as the risk of divorce for the college-educated declines over time. To test how the educational impact of parental divorce shift over time, I use data from the PSID for cohorts born between the 1950s and 1990s. Preliminary results show that the impact of parental divorce over time is not constant, with parental divorce having no impact on educational attainment for the earliest cohorts, and much larger impacts for those born in the 1970s and 1980s. Future analysis will attempt to evaluate the possible explanations for the change in the association between parental divorce and children’s educational attainment.

Author

• Matthew Wolf Sheen, University of Pennsylvania