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Elizabeth Dayton
Johns Hopkins University

"First in my family": How children become the first generation in college

FINAL REPORT

Summary: Parent education and family income are two of the strongest and most consistent predictors of educational success. However, I seek to understand how some children succeed against the odds, becoming the first in their families to attend college, while others slip through the cracks of higher education, falling short of their parents’ college attainment. I analyze the nationally representative National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 to examine the possible benefits of a broader breadth of family relationships than has previously been considered in concert, including the number of parents and children in the home (as the parent-child ratio influences the number of parent-hours available per child); perceptions of parent support; a combination of responsive-and-strict parenting; how frequently families talk about education and goals; whether parents know youth’s friends, friends’ parents, teachers, whereabouts, and school activities; and the provision of an enriching environment. Using multinomial logistic regression, I find each of these valuable family relationships dramatically improves the odds that youth become the first-generation to attend college rather than following in their parents’ no-college footsteps. Further, these same relationships substantially reduce the odds that youth fall short of their parents’ college education rather than replicating their parents’ college attainment.

Conclusions: A large literature leads us to expect children from less-educated, lower-income families to face real barriers to attending college, while those from highly-educated and high-income families are invested with some of the most valuable resources for educational success. Yet I find that a substantial proportion of socioeconomically disadvantaged youth invested with rich family relationships manage to rise above the educational accomplishments of their parents, while a sizable proportion of advantaged youth deprived of valuable family relationships fall short of their parents’ higher education. This directly measures some of what is often invoked as “unobserved heterogeneity.” That is, research often controls for structural variables (family income, parental education) and acknowledges that families vary in other unobserved ways. In contrast, I examine variables that help explain how families with different structural characteristics promote given outcomes, and why there is variation in those outcomes.

Implications: Understanding what distinguishes educationally mobile students is of particular importance at a time when increasing numbers of American jobs rely on an educated population. Researchers may increasingly wish to collect and analyze data related to family relationships as a key source of variation in youth outcomes. Further, while families and schools have traditionally been seen as separate spheres, programs that bridge the gap between school and family influences on academic achievement have reaped promising rewards: one program that works with over a thousand schools has been found to successfully strengthen both family relationships and student performance. While parent education and family income are relatively well established at a child’s birth, family relationships may provide more room for ongoing development. Building on my findings, interventions may increasingly wish to emphasize the family relationships that distinguish both upwardly and downwardly mobile students.