Educational Attainment Model for Children: Differential Impact of Parents' Education Level for Children Who Lived with Both Parents or Not

Abstract

This study is a modification of the Kane, Spizman, and Donelson, (2013) model for educational attainment of children. The primary modification is to provide separate models for children who lived with both parents compared to those who did not to allow for differential impacts of family characteristics by household type on the children's educational attainment. The study also (1) captures five additional years of educational attainment data that were not available for the Kane, et al., (2013) study, (2) does not impose a functional form on some of the independent variables, (3) modifies the model to facilitate the inclusion of observations for which some data are missing, and (4) provides estimates for the average age at the time various degrees are obtained. The results show that the education levels of both parents are impactful for the educational attainment of children who lived with both parents and that there is no statistical difference between the impact of mother's and father's education level. In contrast, the results show the relatively greater impact of the mother's compared to the father's educational level on the educational attainment of children in households that did not include both parents.