Megan Evans, Jonathan Daw, and S. Michael Gaddis
Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World, 7: 1-22
Publication year: 2021

Abstract

It remains unclear how far back the intergenerational transmission of educational advantage operates because most inquiries are limited to two or three generations. In this study, the authors use four generations of family data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to examine the association of great-grandparents’ educational attainment with their great-grandchildren’s early academic achievement, net of intervening generations’ educational attainments. The authors find that the relationship between great-grandparent educational attainment and great-grandchild early academic achievement is nonlinear, modest, and accounted for entirely by the educational attainment of intervening generations and great-grandchild demographic characteristics. Thus, for early academic achievement, the direct transmission of intergenerational educational advantage is limited to three generations in these data.

Keywords

  • Educational inequality
  • Academic achievement
  • Multigenerational mobility
  • Stratification