Robert
D. Mare (UCLA) and Huey-Chi Chang (Univ. of Wisconsin)
ABSTRACT
This paper
reports an analysis of the effects of parents' educational
attainments on the attainments of their offspring, focusing
on the effects of parents' school transitions. We test the
hypothesis that whether offspring make a given school
transition depends critically on whether their mothers and
fathers have made that same transition. Using data for
Taiwan and the United States, we show substantial effects of
parents' transitions on offspring's transitions, even when
overall levels of parents' schooling are controlled. We
also examine variations in the effects of mother's and
father's schooling on sons and daughters and interaction
effects between parents' transitions and family size. In
the United States, the effect of parents' transitions is
large, pervasive and independent of the sex of parent, sex
of offspring, and family resource constraints. In Taiwan
this effect is mainly confined to the school attainments of
fathers and its benefit goes mainly to sons. These results
suggest that the presence or absence of the effects of
whether parents make school transitions can provide concrete
clues about variations in how educational stratification
works.
