Department of Sociology, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, 29208, USA.
Demography. 2018 Feb;55(1):59-82. doi: 10.1007/s13524-017-0637-4.
A rich tradition of stratification research has established a robust link between mothers' education and the skills in children that forecast children's own mobility. Yet, this research has failed to consider that many U.S. women are now completing their education after having children. Such a trend raises questions about whether increases in mothers' educational attainment can improve their children's skill development and whether these gains are enough to reduce inequalities in skills compared with children whose mothers completed the same degree before they were born. To answer these questions, we draw on a nationally representative sample of mothers and children participating in the National Longitudinal Surveys (NLSY79 and CNLY), random- and fixed-effects techniques, and repeated measures of children's cognitive and noncognitive skills. Contrary to existing research and theory, our results reveal that educational attainment obtained after children's births is not associated with an improvement in children's skills. Such findings offer substantial refinement to a long-standing model of intergenerational mobility by suggesting that the intergenerational returns to mother's education are weaker when education is acquired after children are born. Results also highlight the limits of two-generation policy approaches to reducing inequality in future generations.
分层研究的丰富传统已经确立了母亲教育与预测儿童自身流动性的儿童技能之间的紧密联系。然而，这项研究未能考虑到现在许多美国女性在生育后完成学业。这种趋势引发了一些问题，即母亲受教育程度的提高是否能促进其子女技能的发展，以及这些收益是否足以减少与那些母亲在其出生前就已完成相同学位的子女相比的技能不平等。为了回答这些问题，我们利用了参与全国纵向调查（NLSY79 和 CNLY）的母亲和儿童的全国代表性样本、随机和固定效应技术以及儿童认知和非认知技能的重复测量。与现有研究和理论相反，我们的结果表明，子女出生后获得的教育程度与儿童技能的提高无关。这些发现通过表明在子女出生后接受教育时，母亲教育的代际回报较弱，对代际流动的长期模型进行了实质性的改进。研究结果还突出了两代人政策方法在减少未来几代人不平等方面的局限性。
