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Are Asian Households in the U.S. More Likely than Other Households to Help Children with College Costs?

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Abstract

We test whether Asian parents place more importance on helping their children with college costs than parents in other racial/ethnic groups. Some previous research has shown that Asian parents are more likely than comparable White parents to list saving for college as an important goal, but does that indicate that they place more importance on helping their children with college costs? Descriptive analyses of the 2013 Survey of Consumer Finances indicate that Asian parents are more likely than White parents to (1) expect to contribute to their children’s college costs and (2) list college as an important saving goal. Our logistic regression controlling for household characteristics shows that among households with at least one child age 13 to 17, Asian parents are not different from parents with other racial/ethnic identification in expecting to contribute to their children’s college costs. Controlling for household characteristics and expecting to contribute to their children’s college costs, White parents have less than half of the odds of listing college as an important saving goal as Asian parents. However, listing college as a saving goal may not be a good indicator of the importance placed by parents of college for their children, as there are other ways to help with college costs, including borrowing, contributing out of current income, and some parents may consider the goal as having been met by their own previous savings or the savings of relatives.

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Notes

  1. See Suits et al. (1978) and Edwards and Parry (2018) for discussions of the use of spline variables. Hanna et al. (2015) used the same specification in some of their models as we did for net worth. We also tried an alternate functional form proposed by a reviewer, the Inverse Hyperbolic Sine function, but based on those results, our conclusions about the racial/ethnic effects would the same as what we report in this article.

  2. Almost half of the respondents in each analytic sample reported only one goal, and few reported more than three goals, similar to the results reported by Lee and Hanna (2015).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Human Sciences Department, Ohio State University, 1787 Neil Ave., Columbus, OH, 43210, USA

    Congrong Ouyang & Sherman D. Hanna

  2. Department of Consumer Sciences, University of Alabama, 312 Adams Hall, Box 870158, Tuscaloosa, AL, 35487, USA

    Kyoung Tae Kim

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  1. Congrong Ouyang
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  2. Sherman D. Hanna
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  3. Kyoung Tae Kim
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Correspondence to Congrong Ouyang.

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Ouyang, C., Hanna, S.D. & Kim, K.T. Are Asian Households in the U.S. More Likely than Other Households to Help Children with College Costs?. J Fam Econ Iss 40, 540–552 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10834-019-09614-6

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