Parental education, divorce, and children’s educational attainment: Evidence from a comparative analysis

Children who experience parental divorce have worse long-term educational attainment than children living in intact families. Less clear is the extent to which heterogeneity in the divorce penalty depends on parents' socioeconomic background and contextual characteristics. This study focuses on the negative consequences of parental divorce for children's tertiary education attainment, their heterogeneity by parental socioeconomic background, and variation across time and space. Single-level and multi-level linear probability models are estimated on several data sources in a comparative analysis of European countries and US regions. Different operationalizations of parental divorce are employed, including both marital and non-marital dissolutions. Children of high-SES families have more to lose in terms of the family resources relevant to achieving a university degree and are thus more negatively affected by parental divorce.