Passing the Torch: Does Higher Education for the Disadvantaged Pay Off Across the Generations?

4. Breaking the Cycle of Disadvantage: Maternal Education and Children’s Success

57 Chapter 4 Breaking the Cycle of Disadvantage: Maternal Education and Children’s Success I n previous chapters we examined how going to college affects the lives of women, particularly their subsequent earnings, household income, and home ownership. Our concern in this chapter is whether higher education for women also translates into benefits for the next generation. If a mother’s college education spills over to improve her children’s chances of success, then increasing maternal access to college may reduce the transmission of disadvantage down the generations, and serve as a positive force for social mobility. Considering families across several generations reframes social inequality as a dynamic process. Some families rise out of poverty into affluence, from grandparents who were high school dropouts to grandchildren with advanced degrees. Others slide downward in the course of two or three generations. So rather than think of a family as located in one class or social position, we will stress its trajectory from one generation to the next and then look at the role of education in this process. An emphasis on intergenerational mobility and family trajectories also draws us away from the world of Horatio Alger, where each person forges a destiny through personal talent and effort. Instead, we allow that a person’s success depends in part on parents and other family members. This viewpoint conceives of families as accumulating (or sometimes losing) educational, occupational, and financial resources over several generations. Thus, the success of one generation generates resources or advantages that may (or may not) be handed down or transferred to the younger generation. Sometimes a resource consists of specific skills or aptitudes: a mother passes on her mathematical skills to her child, or a father his love of reading . In other instances, the transfer is more a matter of expectations: some parents communicate that going to college is expected of their children and thereby motivate the children to strive in high school. Psychological orientations can also be passed down the generations: some families inculcate their children with a belief that you are the master of your own destiny; others instill a more fatalistic or pessimistic creed. Each of these elements, inherited from the family, can enhance a child’s likelihood of success during school and beyond. The notion of intergenerational accumulation and transfer might seem to suggest a high degree of social inertia, because families that have lots of skills and resources to begin with can pass them on, whereas families that lack them cannot. This would imply that the rich get richer across the generations, while the poor get poorer. Our view is not that pessimistic, however. Sometimes important resources are available from outside the family. Success in school, attending college, and marrying are paramount examples of external influences that can change an individual’s and a family’s mobility trajectory. Moreover, transferring skills, expectations, and psychological orientations from one generation to the next doesn’t always work. Some children rebel against family influence, and others lack their parents’ talent or drive, despite parental encouragement. The transmission of privilege and disadvantage is therefore a probabilistic process, a matter of inheriting better or worse resources for success, but there are always some people who beat the odds and others who lose despite initial advantages. If maternal higher education does play a significant role in enhancing children’s success, we then need to identify the mechanisms through which this process works. Is it the higher income of a college-educated mother that matters? Or her ability to find a more educated husband or partner? Or the impact of her occupation and career? Or does she raise her children differently, by dint of her own educational experiences? In chapters 5 and 6 we will examine each of these mechanisms, but the present chapter focuses on the logically prior question: How much of a difference does maternal education make for children? The Children’s Data As in previous chapters, we analyzed data drawn from two longitudinal studies. The CUNY (City University of New York) study assembled baseline information on a cohort of women college entrants in the early 1970s, and collected new information about the women and about the educational and occupational status of their 2,632 children in the year 2000. Our other main source of data is a nationwide survey of mothers and children, called the NLSY (National Longitudinal Survey of Youth) Mother-Child Sample. The NLSY population is broader than the CUNY study in two...