The declining influence of family background on educational attainment in Australia: The role of measured and unmeasured influences

The paper examines changes in the influence of family background, including socioeconomic and social background variables on educational attainment in Australia for cohorts born between 1890 and 1982. We test hypotheses from modernization theory on sibling data using random effects models and find: (i) substantial declines in the influence of family background on educational attainment (indicated by the sibling intraclass correlations); (ii) declines in the effects of both economic and cultural socioeconomic background variables; (iii) changes in the effects of some social background variables (e.g., family size); (iv) and declines in the extent that socioeconomic and social background factors account for variation in educational attainment. Unmeasured family background factors are more important, and proportionally increasingly so, for educational attainment than the measured socioeconomic and social background factors analyzed. Fixed effects models showed steeper declines in the effects of socioeconomic background variables than in standard analyses suggesting that unmeasured family factors associated with socioeconomic background obscure the full extent of the decline.     

How Does Size of Sibship Matter? Family Configuration and Family Effects on Educational Attainment

Using data from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study for full sibships of sizes two to five, we estimate models of the effects of social background, size of sibship, and gender on sibling resemblance in educational attainment. We find no differences in educational attainment by gender composition within those family sizes. Smaller sibships obtain more schooling, and men obtain more schooling than women. Smaller families are more heterogeneous than larger families, but the effects of measured social background characteristics do not vary by size of sibship or gender composition of sibship. The effects of social background variables on the schooling of women are uniformly smaller than among men, and the nonshared (within-family) variations in schooling are much smaller among women than among men. These findings could lead to incorrect inferences that families matter more for women than for men or that large families experience more varied outcomes than small families.     

Skin color,sex, and educational attainment in the post-civil rights era

We assess the relationship between skin color and educational attainment for native-born non-Hispanic Black and White men and women, using data from the Coronary Artery Risk Development in Young Adults (CARDIA) Study. CARDIA is a medical cohort study with twenty years of social background data and a continuous measure of skin color, recorded as the percent of light reflected off skin. For Black men and women, we find a one-standard-deviation increase in skin lightness to be associated with a quarter-year increase in educational attainment. For White women, we find an association approximately equal in magnitude to that found for Black respondents, and the pattern of significance across educational transitions suggests that skin color for White women is not simply a proxy for family background. For White men, any relationship between skin color and attainment is not robust and, analyses suggest, might primarily reflect differences in family background. Findings suggest that discrimination on the basis of skin color may be less specific to race than previously thought.     

Whither the virtuous cycle? Past and future trends in black-white inequality in educational attainment

The inequality in the relative years of education between blacks and whites has diminished dramatically over the 20th century. One possible explanation for this convergence is a virtuous cycle of parents passing on educational advantage, from one generation to the next, leading to an overall educational upgrading. In this paper we test the virtuous cycle hypothesis by estimating the three way interaction of cohort, race, and family background. We find that the convergence in educational attainment between blacks and whites over the past century was driven by processes unrelated to family background.     

Inequality of educational opportunity in France and the United States

Unequality of educational opportunity is related to school structure. Comparison of the attainment process in France and the United States reveals the consequences of structure for individuals' attainments. Turner's (1960) typology of educational systems is applied. The French educational system is shown to be closer to Turner's “sponsorship system,” and that of the U. S. closer to the “contest” type. Inequality of educational opportunity, as indicated by the effect of father's occupational status on years of schooling completed, is greater in France than in the U. S. The difference is accounted for by school structural variables, indicating the importance of structure for inequality of opportunity. Other differences concerning the causes of educational attainment in France and the U. S. are also discussed.     

The lasting effect of intergenerational wealth transfers: Human capital,family formation,and wealth

Recent evidence indicates that inheritances and other intergenerational wealth transfers have only a limited effect on wealth inequality and the intergenerational transmission of financial well-being. In this study, we explore the role that human capital and family formation play in mediating the relationship between receiving a transfer and building wealth. We examine how educational attainment and family formation determine whether or not households are able to convert inheritances into greater assets, facilitating improved wealth accumulation. Using data from the Panel Study for Income Dynamics (PSID), we examine how these factors moderate wealth accumulation trajectories following a bequest or inter vivos gift. Results reveal that educational attainment and marriage each facilitate wealth accumulation following a transfer. Our evidence suggests that cumulative advantage processes produce divergent wealth accumulation trajectories but these are situated in important turning points in the life course.     

A tale half told: State exclusionary and inclusionary regimes,incarceration of fathers,and the educational attainment of children

Paternal incarceration leads to educational disparities among children who are innocent of their fathers’ crimes. The scale and concentration of mass paternal incarceration thus harms millions of innocent American children. Current individuallevel analyses neglect the contribution of macro-level variation in responses of punitive state regimes to this social problem. We hypothesize that state as well as individual level investment in exclusionary paternal incarceration diminishes the educational attainment of children, although state inclusionary investment in welfare and education can offset some – and could potentially offset more - of this harm. Understanding intergenerational educational attainment therefore requires individual- and contextuallevel analyses. We use Hierarchical Generalized Linear Models to analyze the National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent to Adult Health. Disparities in postsecondary educational outcomes are especially detrimental for children of incarcerated fathers located in state regimes with high levels of paternal incarceration and concentrated disadvantage. This has important implications for intergenerational occupational and status attainment.     

Do grandparents matter? A multigenerational perspective on educational attainment in Taiwan

In response to the growing interest in multigenerational effects, we investigate whether grandparents’ education affects grandchildren’s transitions to academic high school and university in Taiwan. Drawing on social capital literature, we consider potential heterogeneity of the grandparent effect by parents’ characteristics and propose that grandparents’ education yields differential effects depending on parents’ education. Our results show tenuous effects of grandmother’s and grandfather’s years of schooling, net of parents’ education. However, the positive interaction effects between grandparents’ and parents’ years of schooling indicate that grandparents’ additional years of schooling are more beneficial to students with more educated parents than for students with less educated parents. The diverging gap in the likelihood of attending academic high school or university between students with parents in higher and lower ends of the educational hierarchy, along with increased levels of grandparents’ education, supports our hypothesis that grandparents’ education augments educational inequality by parents’ education.     

Mexican parent's undocumented status and the educational attainment of the children left behind

Research shows that having undocumented parents lowers the educational attainment of children that grew up in the United States, but we know less about how it affects the education of children left behind in their origin countries. We use fixed effects models and data from the Mexican Migration Project to examine this relationship. We find that having both parents documented increases the educational attainment of children left behind by over two years in comparison to similar children with mixed-status, undocumented, and nonimmigrant parents. The effect is especially robust for boys that migrate as teenagers. These findings reveal that US immigration laws that define most Mexican immigrants as undocumented have had a devastating effect on the education of Mexican children left behind.     

Race and Wealth Inequality: The Impact of Racial Differences in Asset Ownership on the Distribution of Household Wealth

What accounts for persistent racial differences in wealth ownership? Previous research has debated the role that differences in asset ownership play in creating and maintaining wealth inequality. I use survey data to model the ownership of seven assets and find that whites are indeed more likely than blacks to buy high-risk, high-return assets. I then use a simulation model to explore the effect that these differences have on the distribution of wealth. I separate the effects of asset ownership from the effects of racial differences in family wealth history, earnings, education, marital behavior, fertility, and other influences on wealth inequality. I find that removing racial differences in asset ownership reduced wealth inequality drastically, but not completely, and that racial differences in educational attainment account for much of the remaining difference. I estimate how changes in historical patterns of portfolio behavior and educational attainment would have reduced inequality, and I explore the implications of these findings for reducing wealth inequality in the future.     

Some cross-population comparisons of family bias in the effects of schooling on occupational status

It is a truism of research on social stratification that the effects of socioeconomic or family background on educational attainment and adult success lead to biases in the simple regressions of occupational status (or other putative outcomes of schooling) on educational attainment. The present analysis compares findings of family bias in the effects of schooling on occupational status across samples of siblings drawn from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study and from Olneck's sample of brothers from Kalamazoo, Michigan. The comparative analysis shows that family bias in the effect of schooling on occupational status may be much less than is commonly believed and that very large samples may be needed to measure it reliably. Moreover, the analysis suggests that estimates of family bias are very sensitive to the specification of response variability in schooling. The analysis also illustrates some useful methods for cross-population comparison of structural equation models.     

对义务教育的公平性的质疑及启示

本文首先分析公平的内涵,依据对亚里士多德思想的诠释,认为公平问题可转化为权利问题,公平即人类拥有基本权利的平等与非基本权利的不平等。进而分析教育公平的涵义,指出义务教育既是促进教育公平的重要手段,如果实施不当,又会在一定程度上对教育公平产生阻碍作用。论文介绍了西方学者针对义务教育公平性的各种质疑,以及这些质疑观点对我国义务教育政策的启示。     

Competitive threat and temporal change in anti-immigrant sentiment: Insights from a hierarchical age-period-cohort model

The study focuses on over-time change in anti-immigrant attitudes across European societies and on the role played by cohorts in producing the change in attitudes. We assembled data from four waves of the European Social Surveys for 14 countries between 2002 and 2014. The data analysis is conducted within the framework of a hierarchical age-period-cohort model (HAPC) to estimate the dynamic relations between anti-immigrant sentiment and country's social and economic conditions, while taking into consideration variations across individuals and birth-cohorts. The analysis lends support to expectations derived from the ‘competitive threat’ theoretical model. The findings show that a higher share of non-European ethnic minorities in the country's population is associated with a higher level of ant-immigrant attitudes. Anti-immigrant sentiment was found to be more pronounced in the ‘old immigration countries’ than in the ‘new immigration countries.’ The impact of economic conditions on anti-immigrant sentiment becomes evident through the effect of cohort in the ‘new immigration countries’: cohorts that entered the labor market when the unemployment rate was high are likely to hold more negative attitudes toward immigrants.     

Education, gender, and migration in the context of social change

Although sociologists have identified education as likely determinant of migration, the ways in which education affects migration are unclear and empirical results are disparate. This paper addresses the relationship between educational attainment, enrolment, and migration, focusing on the role of gender and how it changes with evolving social contexts. Using empirical analyses based in Nepal, results indicate that educational attainment has positive effects and enrolment has negative effects on out-migration and including enrolment in the model increases the effect of attainment. In the case of women, with the changing role of gender, increased education and labor force participation, the affect of educational attainment changes drastically over time, from almost no effect, to a strong positive effect. Consideration of enrolment, and the role of gender in education, employment, and marriage may help to explain the disparate results in past research on education and migration.     

Does death really make us equal? Educational attainment and resource compensation after paternal death in Finland

Attempts to explain the persistent importance of family background for children's educational attainment typically highlight the ways in which parents pass down educational, economic and social resources to their children. However, parental resources may also play a crucial role for preventing family crises from spiraling into cumulative disadvantage. To study such compensation processes, we examine the consequences of a father's death on children's educational trajectories, using a Finnish register-based sample of children born between 1982 and 1987. The results based on multilevel linear probability models both support and contradict our compensation hypothesis. Children who lost their father were not more likely to drop out of upper secondary school, as long as their surviving mother had high levels of socioeconomic resources. Similar compensation processes were visible in the case of entering polytechnic higher education. However, with regard to university attendance, bereavement noticeably reduced the traditional advantage of children with high-resource parents.     

College for some to college for all: Social background, occupational expectations, and educational expectations over time

The educational expectations of 10th-graders have dramatically increased from 1980 to 2002. Their rise is attributable in part to the changing educational composition of students’ parents and related to the educational profiles of their expected occupations. Students whose parents have gone to college are more likely to attend college themselves, and students expect occupations that are more prestigious in 2002 than in 1980. The educational requirements of particular occupation categories have risen only slightly. These analyses also reveal that educational expectations in recent cohorts are more loosely linked to social background and occupational plans than they were in 1980. The declining importance of parents’ background and the decoupling of educational and occupational plans, in addition to a strong and significant effect of cohort on educational expectations, suggest that the expectation of four-year college attainment is indeed becoming the norm.     

Does Family Structure Really Influence Educational Attainment?

This paper examines the effects of family structure on educational attainment after controlling for common family influences, observed and unobserved, using data from siblings. The use of sibling data permits us to examine whether the apparent effects of family structure are due to unmeasured characteristics of families that are common to siblings. The data come from pairs of siblings in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 1979–1992. The results suggest that taking into account the unmeasured family characteristics yields estimates of the effects of family structure on educational attainment that are smaller, but still statistically significant, than estimates based on analyses that do not take unmeasured family influences into account.     

Educational inequalities in parental care time: Cross-national evidence from Belgium,Denmark, Spain,and the United Kingdom

This study uses time-diary data for dual-earner couples from Belgium, Denmark, Spain, and the United Kingdom to analyze educational inequalities in parental care time in different national contexts. For mothers, education is significantly associated with parenting involvement only in Spain and the United Kingdom. In Spain these differences are largely explained by inequalities in mothers' time and monetary resources, but not in the United Kingdom, where less-educated mothers disproportionally work in short part-time jobs. For fathers, education is associated with parenting time in Denmark, and particularly in Spain, while the wife's resources substantially drive these associations. On weekends, the educational gradient in parental care time applies only to Spain and the United Kingdom, two countries with particularly large inequalities in parents' opportunities to engage in parenting. The study shows country variations in educational inequalities in parenting, suggesting that socioeconomic resources, especially from mothers, shape important variations in parenting involvement.     

Education and risky sex in Africa: Unraveling the link between women’s education and reproductive health behaviors in Kenya

Much research attention has been devoted to understanding the relationship between education and riskier sex-related behaviors and HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa. While in the early 1990s researchers found that increases in education were associated with a higher incidence of HIV/AIDS, this relationship appears to have reversed and better educated people, especially women, appear less likely to engage in riskier sex-related behaviors and have a lower incidence rate of HIV/AIDS. Our study begins to unravel the mechanisms that could explain why women’s educational attainment is associated with safer sex-related behaviors in sub-Saharan Africa. Using data from the 2003 Kenyan Demographic and Health Survey, we examine the potential mediating effects of HIV/AIDS knowledge, family planning discussions, gender empowerment, and husband’s education for explaining the relationship between education and age of first sex, casual sex, multiple sex partners, and condom use. We find that gender empowerment partially explains the relationship between education and age of first sex, and HIV/AIDS knowledge, husband’s education, and family planning discussions partially explain the relationship between education and condom use. We argue that gender inequality and lack of knowledge are likely to play a greater role in explaining the relationship between woman’s education and sex-related behaviors in sub-Saharan Africa than they do in more industrialized nations, where social capital explanations may have more explanatory power.     

Early-Onset Psychiatric Disorders and Male Socioeconomic Status

We seek to integrate economic, sociological and psychological models by examining whether early-onset psychiatric disorders predict adult male socioeconomic status. Unlike most status attainment studies, we include information on major psychiatric disorders. We use data from the National Comorbidity Survey, the first survey to administer a structured psychiatric interview to a national probability sample in the U.S. Our sample includes men between the ages of 25 and 54. We find that disorders that occur before age 16 reduce educational attainment and the probability of being currently married and increase the probability of having a recent disorder, each of which is a predictor of adult male unemployment. We also find that these early-onset disorders have a direct negative effect on male employment. The estimated magnitudes of these effects are often as large as those of family background variables, suggesting that research on adult male SES should pay greater attention to mental health issues.