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Title: What Skills Can Buy: Transmission of Advantage through Cognitive and Noncognitive Skills
Resulting in 1 citation.
1. Doren, Catherine
Grodsky, Eric
What Skills Can Buy: Transmission of Advantage through Cognitive and Noncognitive Skills
Presented: San Diego CA, Population Association of America Annual Meeting, April-May 2015
Cohort(s): Children of the NLSY79, NLSY79, NLSY79 Young Adult
Publisher: Population Association of America
Keyword(s): Armed Forces Qualifications Test (AFQT); College Degree; College Enrollment; Family Income; Intergenerational Patterns/Transmission; Mothers, Education; Parenting Skills/Styles; Peabody Individual Achievement Test (PIAT- Math); Peabody Individual Achievement Test (PIAT- Reading); Pearlin Mastery Scale; Rotter Scale (see Locus of Control)

Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher.

Although never far from social scientists' attention, interest in the intergenerational flow of advantage and disadvantage has recently gained prominence in both academic and popular venues. Income inequality is rising (Western et al. 2012) and with it inequality in direct investments in children (Kornrich and Furstenberg 2013) and academic achievement tied to parental income (Reardon 2011). While income and wealth as resources undoubtedly contribute to the intergenerational transmission of social status, we argue that they are at least partly endogenous to parents' cognitive and noncognitive skills and advantages bestowed by these skills rather than material resources themselves are driving much of the observed relationship between capital and children's educational attainment. We analyze the NLSY 1979 cohort and their children to disentangle the effects of parent skills from those of resources. Preliminary findings suggest that more than half of the association of resources and educational attainment is traceable to parent skills.
Bibliography Citation
Doren, Catherine and Eric Grodsky. "What Skills Can Buy: Transmission of Advantage through Cognitive and Noncognitive Skills." Presented: San Diego CA, Population Association of America Annual Meeting, April-May 2015.