The Relative Effects of Different Forms of Family Capital on Young Adults' Educational Attainment

Background and Purpose: The current educational attainment process in American society is increasingly stratified by families’ economic positions due to rising social and economic inequalities. Unfortunately, research that examines how family background influences educational achievement of young adults does not examine the multidimensional aspects of family resources and how these resources are deployed during transitions to adulthood. Therefore, situating this study in Pierre Bourdieu’s (1986; 1984) theoretical understanding of family background measures, which encompasses a multidimensional configuration of family resources and processes (Family Capital), this paper seeks to examine how the distinct dimensions of family capital, can be used to predict the educational attainment of a national representative sample of young adults.

 

Methods: This paper used a subsample of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 (N=4707) and examined all data available up to the 14^th Wave (2010). Young adults in the sample are between the age 25 to 29 years with a mean age of 27.05 (SD= .80). Measures for this study consisted of the 4-Factors identified in an initial Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) study of 15 select measures of family resources and processes. The 1^st Factor captured Parental Involvement, the 2^nd Factor captured Economic Capital of families, the 3^rd Factor captured respondents’ Social Networks, and the 4^th Factor captured Closeness-to-Parental Figures. Ordinal Logistic Regression was used to examine the direct effects (based model) and indirect effects of the latent family capital construct on young adults’ educational achievement (measured as highest degree achieved), while also controlling for demographic measures (2^nd model) and measures of traditional milestones associated with adulthood (full-model).  

Results: Eleven percent of the sampled had no educational certification at all by the end of the study period (2010). 57.1% had a High School Diploma (or GED), and 6.7% had an Associate degree. About a fifth (20.9%) had a Bachelor’s degree and only about 4.1% had a Master’s degree or higher. Several key findings emerged: First, the latent family capital construct is a promising and adequate measure whose model fits the data well, even with addition of other controls. Second, different dimensions of the latent family capital construct predict educational achievement differently. While Family Involvement and SES are positively, significant and consistently associated with higher levels of educational achievement throughout the different models estimated, Closeness-to-Parental Figures is significantly associated with educational achievement only with the inclusion of traditional milestones associated with adulthood – direction is contrary to expectation. Third and last, other controls such as race, sex, age, adult milestones and presence of other dependents in the household significantly influence higher levels of educational achievement and in the expected direction.    

 

Conclusion and Implications: The conventional approach to reducing educational disparities between students from high and low-income families is to focus on financial and institutional approaches. For social welfare researchers and practitioner, these findings suggest that perhaps a promising approach is to identify important ingredients in the stock of family capital and develop low-cost interventions that could focus on leveraging the resource pool and processes of low income families.