Cognitive, Noncognitive, and Family Background Contributions to College Attainment: A Behavioral Genetic Perspective

Abstract

Objective There is considerable evidence that college attainment is associated with family background and cognitive and non-cognitive skills. Behavioral genetic methods are used to determine whether the family background effect is mediated through cognitive and non-cognitive skill development. Method We analyze data from two longitudinal behavioral genetic studies, the Minnesota Twin Family Study, consisting of 1382 pairs of like-sex twins and their parents, and the Sibling Interaction and Behavior Study, consisting of 409 adoptive and 208 non-adoptive families with two offspring and their rearing parents. Results Cognitive ability, non-cognitive skills, and family background are all associated with offspring college attainment. Biometric analysis show that the intergenerational transmission of college attainment owes to both genetic and shared environmental factors. The shared environmental influence was not due to highly educated parents fostering non-cognitive skill development in their children and there was limited evidence that they foster cognitive skill development. Conclusions The environmental transmission of educational attainment does not appear to be a consequence of highly-educated parents fostering cognitive and non-cognitive skill development. Alternative mechanisms are needed to explain the strong shared environmental influence on college attainment. Possibilities include academic expectations, social network effects, and the economic benefits of having wealthy parents.

Parental educational attainment and adult offspring personality: An intergenerational life span approach to the origin of adult personality traits.

“…First, we tested whether the offspring’s education mediated the relation between parental education and offspring personality. Parental education is a strong predictor of offspring educational attainment: Offspring with parents who have more years of education are approximately 2–3 times more likely to graduate from college than offspring with parents who have less education (McGue, Rustichini, & Iacono, in press). To the extent that education is associated with specific traits (Mortensen et al, 2014), it may be one mechanism that accounts for part of the association between parental education and offspring personality.…”

Consistency of non-cognitive skills and their relation to educational outcomes in a UK cohort

“…Previous studies have demonstrated that people with higher measurements of non-cognitive skills have better education, health and labour market outcomes (2)(3)(4)(5)(6)(7)(8). For example, Borghans and colleagues report that personality explains 16% of the variance in achievement scores in a US sample (8).…”

“…0.52 for digit span to 0.82 for reading) (16), and suggest that measurement error on non-cognitive skills may be relatively high (5). Modest correlations between different non-cognitive skills have been observed for a range of traits such as grit and conscientiousness (18); academic effort and academic problems (7); and internalising and externalising behaviours (19). The bulk of reported correlations between non-cognitive skills though have been small (7,18), supporting the multidimensionality of non-cognitive skills.…”

“…Modest correlations between different non-cognitive skills have been observed for a range of traits such as grit and conscientiousness (18); academic effort and academic problems (7); and internalising and externalising behaviours (19). The bulk of reported correlations between non-cognitive skills though have been small (7,18), supporting the multidimensionality of non-cognitive skills. The relationships between non-cognitive skills is however unknown as few datasets have measured many skills.…”

“…Furthermore, there is genetic evidence that personality types are stable over time (22), providing support that personality measures successfully pick up genuine signal of an underlying trait. Heritability estimates for other non-cognitive skills have varied widely from 0.44 to 0.79 for self-control (23,24); 0.36 for alienation (7); 0.83 for academic effort (7); 0.31 to 0.56 for aspects of openness (25); 0.18 to 0.49 for aspects of conscientiousness (26); and 0.40 for enjoyment and self-perceived ability (27). Sibling correlations for non-cognitive skills are lower than for cognitive skills (28), consistent with a smaller genetic component.…”