Status
Working paper.
Abstract
Research on the transmission of advantage long measured family background by the father, and women's education has since overtaken men's. Recent studies of adults in single countries disagree on whether mothers' resources came to matter more. I follow the next generation of children across many countries. In seven cycles of the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment, 2003 to 2022, I compare children whose mother alone holds a tertiary degree with children whose father alone holds one, in 79 education systems with repeated data. Within systems, the score difference between these two family types rose by 3.0 points per decade in mathematics and 3.9 in reading, from a disadvantage to parity or an advantage. Parents' reports at about age 10, in the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study, show a higher contrast in later cohorts, but the change falls at a revision of the questionnaire, and these data cannot rule out a change in how children report their parents' education. At age 15, most of the rise lies between schools. Parents' occupational status shows no such change, and the causes of the rise remain open.