A withering educational advantage? The effect of educational expansion among parents on the academic achievement of children with university-educated parents
Extensive research has examined the effect of educational expansion in one cohort on educational inequality and occupational returns in that same cohort. This study makes a novel contribution by exploring whether the expansion of university education among parents affects their children’s academic achievement. We argue that expansion reduces the selectivity of university attainment, making graduates progressively less selected on traits relevant to their children’s achievement. Additionally, expansion likely diminishes occupational returns to the university degree, increasing the proportion of overqualified university-graduated parents. Consequently, the average achievement of children from university-educated families should diminish with the expansion among parents (withering advantage hypothesis). Using data from 30 countries across seven waves of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), we show that students from university-educated families experience a notable decline in achievement as the proportion of university-educated parents increases. Importantly, the growing overqualification of university-educated parents and the diminishing objectified cultural capital of university- educated families mediate this negative effect. Furthermore, we also observe a negative association between educational expansion among parents and children’s achievement in non- university-educated families, but less pronounced, resulting in a negative (albeit modest) association between expansion among parents and inequality among children.
The average academic achievement of students from university-educated families decreases with the expansion of university education among their parents.
The achievement of students from non-university-educated families is also negatively related to expansion in the parents’ generation, but the relationship is weaker. Consequently, the higher the proportion of university-educated families, the lower the inequality in academic achievement among children.
Two mechanisms explain part of these associations: the increasing overqualification of university-educated parents resulting from the lower occupational returns to the university degree, and the decreasing endowment of cultural capital as a result of the weaker selection into university education.