Short-Term and Long-Term Educational Mobility of Families: A Two Sex Approach

PWP-CCPR-2014-013

Abstract

We investigate how families reproduce and pass on their educational advantages to succeeding generations from a multigenerational perspective. Unlike traditional mobility studies that typically focus on one-sex influences from fathers to sons, we rely on a two-sex approach that accounts for the marriage market interaction between males and females, which includes educational assortative mating in both parent and grandparent generations and intergenerational transmission of educational status through both the male and female sides of families over three generations. Using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we approach this issue from both a short-term and a long-term perspective. For the short term, grandparents’ educational attainments have a direct association with grandchildren’s education as well as an indirect association that is mediated by parents’ education and demographic behaviors. For the long term, initial educational advantages of families may benefit as many as three subsequent generations, but such advantages are later offset by the lower fertility of highly educated persons. Yet all families eventually achieve the same educational distribution of descendants because of intermarriages between high- and low-education origin families.