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. Mothers' contributions may have grown given their increased status-measured here as their education, occupational status, and earnings-and the rise of single-parent families. Using data from three large, nationally representative U.S. surveys, we find that the returns to mothers' status have remained relatively stable and similar to fathers' among children born from the 1930s to the 1980s and thus account for little of observed increases in children's college completion. But this does not mean nothing has changed. Our decomposition results show that the outsized role of recent increases in women's education, occupational status, and earnings for families' standard of living has meant that increased levels of mothers' status account for more of the increase in children's college completion than 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.