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Author: Zhou, Weibo
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Zhou, Weibo |
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The Relationship of Family Structure and Postsecondary Schooling in the U.S. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Economics, State University of New York at Stony Brook, 2020 Cohort(s): NLSY79, NLSY97 Publisher: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses (PQDT) Keyword(s): Cohabitation; College Education; Educational Attainment; Educational Outcomes; Family Structure; Parents, Single; Stepfamilies; Transfers, Family Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher. This dissertation focuses on a growing population of college students from non-traditional families. Nontraditional families are defined as those in which respondents lived with a biological or adoptive mother with no father present, the mother and a stepfather, and cohabiting parents, as they progress from enrollment to graduation. First, it has become increasingly common for children to experience diverse family structures, including living with single-parent families, the stepparent families, and cohabiting parents for the past 30 to 40 years. However, those students who experience disruptions in family structures perform worse than their counterparts. In the 1979 cohort, the graduation rate for students from traditional families is 52 percent. By comparison, the graduation rate for students from non-traditional families is 44 percent, for a gap of 8 percentage points. In the 1997 cohort, the graduation rate for students from traditional families is 62 percent. In contrast, graduation rate for students from non-traditional families is 46 percent, for a gap of 16 percentage points. The descriptive statistics tells us not only that students from non-traditional families perform worse than their peers in college, but also that the gap between the college graduation rates of students from traditional and nontraditional families is widening over time. So, it is natural to ask whether the relationship between family structure and students' educational outcomes has changed from Cohort 79 to Cohort 97? If yes, what role does the change in family structure play in explaining the change in college completion rates? The first chapter of my dissertation answers these two questions. Chapter one of my dissertation documents the changing family circumstances of U.S. college students, and their relationship to students’ patterns of college graduation using the 1979 and 1997 cohorts of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY). My empirical models of graduation probability show that students who come from those non-traditional families in the 1979 cohort are just 3 percentage points less likely to graduate from college than those who lived with both of their biological parents up to age 18. However, this gap increased to 9 percentage points for the 1997 cohort. A decomposition exercise based on the estimates demonstrates the share of the change in completion rates that the model attributes to the various observed explanatory variables, particularly to the change in family structure. Results indicate that students' characteristics and family background account for 45 percent of the change in graduation rate, with family structure accounting for 12 percent of the change in graduation rate. The central contribution of this analysis shows the importance of the family structure in explaining changes in college completion over the past 30 years in the United States. Next, using the NLSY97, I observe that while studying in 4-year college, students from traditional families receive around 12000 dollars parental transfer in total, however, students from non-traditional families only receive 6000 dollars parental transfer in total. So, the goal of the second chapter is to understand whether parental transfer can explain some of the disadvantages students from nontraditional families have in college study. The results of probit model show that one thousand dollars increase in parental transfer is associated with a 2 percentage points increase in 4-year college enrollment. Moreover, one thousand dollars increase in the parental transfer is associated with a 0.5 percentage points increase in 4-year college graduation. |
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Bibliography Citation
Zhou, Weibo. The Relationship of Family Structure and Postsecondary Schooling in the U.S. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Economics, State University of New York at Stony Brook, 2020. |