The Additive Advantage of Having Educated Grandfathers for Children’s Education: Evidence from a Cross-National Sample in Europe

Abstract

Until recently, research on intergenerational processes of social mobility has focused on two generational processes and paid little attention to the role of the grand-parental generation. An increasing number of studies have started to address this shortfall, but they report inconsistent findings. This may be due to design and measurement differences across studies and to substantive heterogeneity in the association. We use data from the Survey of Health, Ageing, and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) to explore these two issues. First, as we have information on all four grandparents, and both parents, we were able to evaluate the different ways to model grandparental associations. We found that including information on both grandfathers provided the best fit, once controlling for parental education. Second, we investigated the moderating effects of parental education, family size, and the grandparents' being alive during the grandchild's early life and school years. Having higher educated grandfathers is associated with higher educational outcomes for grandchildren, net of parental education and wealth. Moreover, having two highly educated grandfathers shows a stronger association than just one. We found no evidence for the interactions we tested making it unclear what the mechanisms underlying the association are. Future work to identify the mechanisms may be able to shed light on the actual role that grandparents play. findings so far have, however, been mixed, with some suggesting independent associations of grandparental social class or education with grandchildren's outcomes after taking into account the socioeconomic status of the parents (

Which Grandparents? Multigenerational Education Associations by Grandparent Gender and Paternal versus Maternal Side

“…Hypothesis tests indicate that the maternal grandfathers’ education coefficient (0.028) is not larger than paternal grandfathers’ education (0.018) but is larger than the maternal grandmothers’ education coefficient (0.0008) and the paternal grandmothers’ education coefficient (−0.006), while the paternal grandfathers’ coefficient (0.018) is not significantly larger than the grandmothers’ coefficients from either side. Although the effect sizes are modest, these findings are consistent with previous estimates that show the positive association between grandfathers’ education and grandchildren’s education (Sheppard and Monden 2018).…”

“…Grandfathers’ education may be more readily translated into socioeconomic resources that are passed down the generations and benefit grandchildren’s education because only grandfathers (i.e., men), for the most part, had the ability to use their education to access employment, wealth, and social capital. These results are consistent with previous findings showing a positive association between grandfathers’ education and grandchildren’s education (Sheppard and Monden 2018). However, by including all four grandparents and examining the theoretical perspectives comparing grandparents’ effects by grandparent gender and lineage, this study sheds light on the gender patterns and the underlying mechanisms of grandparent-grandchild education associations.…”

“…This prediction is consistent with the “conventional view” of social background (Goldthorpe 1983). Existing empirical research has generally focused on grandfathers, and although it does not speak to whether the grandfather-grandchild education association is larger than the grandmother-grandchild education association, it nevertheless shows evidence of significant grandfather associations in studies where only grandfathers’ information is available (Chan and Boliver 2013; Hertel and Groh-Samberg 2014; Knigge 2016; Sheppard and Monden 2018).…”