The intergenerational transmission of educational attainment: A closer look at the (interrelated) roles of paternal involvement and genetic inheritance

AbstractNumerous studies have documented a strong intergenerational transmission of educational attainment. In explaining this transmission, separate fields of research have studied separate mechanisms. To obtain a more complete understanding, the current study integrates insights from the fields of behavioural sciences and genetics and examines the extent to which factors from each field are unique underlying mechanisms, correlate with each other, and/or act as important confounders in the intergenerational transmission of educational attainment. Specifically, we focus on paternal involvement as our behavioural indicator and children’s polygenic score (PGS) for education as our genetic indicator and assess the role that fathers play in the intergenerational transmission of educational attainment. To answer our research questions, we use rich data from The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (n=4,579). Firstly, results from our mediation analyses showed that about 4 per cent of the effect of fathers’ educational attainment on children’s educational attainment is explained by paternal involvement, whereas a much larger share, 21 per cent, is explained by children’s education PGS. Secondly, our results showed that these genetic and behavioural influences are significantly correlated to each other. Thirdly, we found support for genetic confounding, as adding children’s education PGS to the model reduced the effect of paternal involvement by 11 per cent. Fourthly, evidence for social confounding was almost negligible (a reduction of half a per cent of the genetic effect). Our findings highlight the importance of integrating insights and data from multiple disciplines in understanding the mechanisms underlying the intergenerational transmission of inequality, as our study reveals that behavioural and genetic influences overlap, correlate, and confound each other as mechanisms underlying this transmission.