The long-term consequences of parental divorce for children’s educational attainment

Abstract

AbstractBACKGROUNDIn this paper we study the long-term consequences of parental divorce in a comparative perspective. Special attention is paid to the heterogeneity of the consequences of divorce for children's educational attainment by parental education.OBJECTIVEThe study attempts to establish whether the parental breakup penalty for tertiary education attainment varies by socioeconomic background, and whether it depends on the societal context.METHODSData are drawn from the first wave of the Generations and Gender Survey, covering 14 countries. We estimate multi-level random-slope models for the completion of tertiary education.RESULTSThe results show that parental divorce is negatively associated with children's tertiary education attainment. Across the 14 countries considered in this study, children of separated parents have a probability of achieving a university degree that is on average seven percentage points lower than that of children from intact families. The breakup penalty is stronger for children of highly educated parents, and is independent of the degree of diffusion of divorce. In countries with early selection into educational tracks, divorce appears to have more negative consequences for the children of poorly educated mothers.CONCLUSIONSFor children in most countries, parental divorce is associated with a lower probability of attaining a university degree. The divorce penalty is larger for children with highly educated parents. This equalizing pattern is accentuated in countries with a comprehensive educational system.COMMENTSFuture research on the heterogeneous consequences of parental divorce should address the issue of self-selection into divorce, which might lead to an overestimation of the negative effect of divorce on students with highly educated parents. It should also further investigate the micro mechanisms underlying the divorce penalty.1. IntroductionStudies of the implications of parental separation for children's well-being have consistently shown that children of divorced parents fare worse on different measures of well-being than children living in intact families (Amato 2001; Amato and Keith 1991) 3. While there is ample evidence that divorce has negative implications for children in the short term, there is less research examining the effect on long-term socioeconomic outcomes (Liu 2007). The consequences of divorce for educational attainment may be of special importance as having a poor education may lead to other socioeconomic and health-related disadvantages, and may therefore persistently undermine an individual's life chances (Ross and Wu 1995; Shavit and Muller 1998). Until relatively recently, research linking family structure and children's well-being has not paid much attention to the moderating effects of socioeconomic background (Demo and Acock 1988). Although newer studies of the consequences of divorce have increasingly controlled for social origin, questions of whether and how the long-term parental breakup penalty for children's educational achievement is related to their socioeconomic background are still largely unanswered (McLanahan, Tach, and Schneider 2013). As Amato (2010: 661) put it, on the average effects of divorce masks the substantial degree of variability that exists in people's adjustment. Finally, possibly due to a lack of adequate data, comparative analyses of cross-country differences in the effects of divorce on children are still rare (but see Dronkers and Harkonen 2008; Engelhardt, Trappe, and Dronkers 2002; Lange, Dronkers, and Wolbers 2009; Pryor and Rodgers 2001).In this paper, we aim to fill these gaps in the literature by focusing on the penalty associated with a parental breakup for tertiary education achievement in a comparative perspective. We do so by bringing together insights from two strands of research: studies on the consequences of divorce and family forms on the one hand, and studies on educational attainment and social mobility on the other. …