The Changing Role of Mothers’ Status in Children’s College Completion

Despite vast changes in women’s status in society and in the home, we have little understanding of the changing role of mothers in shaping children’s life chances. Has mothers’ influence on their children’s educational outcomes grown alongside these shifts? Using data from three large nationally representative U.S. surveys, we find that the returns to mothers’ status—measured as their education, occupational status, and earnings—have remained relatively stable and similar to the returns to fathers’ status among children born from the 1930s to the 1980s, thus accounting for little of the observed increase in children’s college completion. This surprising continuity of the returns to mothers’ status aligns with past evidence of relatively stable intergenerational associations in the face of social change. But this does not mean nothing has changed. Our decomposition results show that increases in women’s education, occupational status, and earnings have meant that increased levels of mothers’ status account for more of the increase in children’s college completion than does fathers’ status among cohorts born since the 1960s. That continued increases in college completion have more to do with the rising status of mothers than fathers has been overlooked by previous research.