Generating Educational Inequality: Multigenerational Approaches to the Transmission of Advantage and Disadvantage

The emergence of inequality as a topic of social and political concern has coincided with a revitalization of research on how families reproduce their advantages and disadvantages. Mare's (2011) call for "a multigenerational view of inequality" has drawn attention to familial processes transcending relationships between parents and children. This dissertation shows three ways that multigenerational researchers' substantive areas and analytical strategies can advance the sociological study of stratification and mobility. To compare multigenerational and conventional approaches, each chapter engages one of the observations Duncan (1966) made about social mobility research. I show that multigenerational responses to the issues Duncan outlined require analyzing the different topics -- not just the different relatives -- that Mare discussed. My three papers do so by considering where families come from, how parents' earlier contexts cause the effects of family background, and how parents' own histories of mobility shape the resources they can pass down to their children.;Following a brief introductory chapter, each paper offers a multigenerational analysis of a type of educational inequality. In the first empirical paper, Richard Breen and I integrate the demographic pathways of family formation into a model of educational reproduction. Our prospective analysis begins with the full cohort of high school graduates in the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study. Members of that cohort who completed college and had children were more likely to have a child who also completed college. But we find that gender differences in the effects of college on marriage and fertility influenced the chances that men and women could pass down their advantages. For female graduates, college had a negative effect on the probability of ever marrying, which in turn reduced the probability of having any children. As a result, the positive direct effects of college for women were almost completely canceled out by the indirect effects of college on family formation. For men, however, college did not decrease the probability that they married or had children. As a result, male college graduates were more likely to pass down the advantages of having completed more schooling.;The second paper responds to Mare's (2011) call to pay attention to the causes of family . background effects. I begin by conceptualizing parents' completed educational attainment as an outcome influenced by parents' high school curricula. Tracing parents' schooling experiences back reinforces the distinction Duncan made between the distribution of a status within a sample of parents and the distribution of a status within parents' generations. To account for that difference, I estimate the effect of a mother's high school academic program on her eventual attainment using probabilities calculated among all the women in the National Longitudinal Study of Youth 1979, not only those who eventually had a child in the Children and Young Adults Survey. I compare the effects of a mother's curricular type and her eventual attainment on the probability that her child would be in a college preparatory curriculum in high school. I find that the total effect of having a mother who was in a college preparatory academic program is equal to the direct effect of having a mother who completed college. Decomposing that total effect shows that a mother's earlier educational experiences matter not only because they allowed her to reach a certain level of schooling, but because they have independent "lingering effects" on her child's opportunities.;The third paper connects Mare's interest in extended relatives to Duncan's interest in the consequences of mobility. I show that comparing the characteristics of grandparents to the characteristics of parents allows for examining the effects of parents' mobility on their children's outcomes. Using data from the Education Longitudinal Study, I consider how educational mobility in the previous generation influences the information and guidance available to students preparing for college. The results suggest that the diverse educational histories of parents who share the same educational attainment as adults are associated with distinct sets of resources. For example, families with parents and grandparents who graduated from college appear better prepared to structure discussions about college in ways that increase the chances that a student would apply to a selective institution. However, in families where parents' college completion represented educational mobility, discussions do not similarly benefit students.;The concluding chapter summarizes the three papers, emphasizes what they suggest about the strengths and limitations in developing multigenerational responses to Duncan's challenges, and offers possible directions for future research.