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Personality and the Intergenerational Transmission of Educational Attainment: Evidence from Germany

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Abstract

Research based in the United States, with its relatively open educational system, has found that personality mediates the relationship between parents’ and child’s educational attainment and this mediational pattern is especially beneficial to students from less-educated households. Yet in highly structured, competitive educational systems, personality characteristics may not predict attainment or may be more or less consequential at different points in the educational career. We examine the salience of personality in the educational attainment process in the German educational system. Data come from a longitudinal sample of 682 17 to 25 year-olds (54% female) from the 2005 and 2015 German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP). Results show that adolescent personality traits—openness, neuroticism, and conscientiousness—are associated with educational attainment, but personality plays a negligible role in the intergenerational transmission of education. Personality is influential before the decision about the type of secondary degree that a student will pursue (during adolescence). After that turning point, when students have entered different pathways through the system, personality is less salient. Cross-national comparisons in a life course framework broaden the scope of current research on non-cognitive skills and processes of socioeconomic attainment, alerting the analyst to the importance of both institutional structures and the changing importance of these skills at different points in the life course.

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Notes

  1. This degree corresponds to the “vocational upper secondary programs” in Fig. 1.

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Funding

This research received support from the Population Research Training grant (T32 HD007168) and the Population Research Infrastructure Program (P2C HD050924) awarded to the Carolina Population Center at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

Author Contributions

R.R. conceived of the study, participated in its design and coordination, cleaned the data, participated in the interpretation of the data, and helped draft the manuscript; S.B. participated in study design, performed the statistical analysis, participated in the interpretation of the data, and helped draft the manuscript; M.Sc. participated in the study design, participated in the interpretation of the data, and helped draft the manuscript; A.S. participated in the interpretation of the data and helped draft the manuscript; M.Sh. conceived of the study, participated in its design, and drafted sections of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 155 Hamilton Hall, CB # 3210, Chapel Hill, NC, 27599-3210, USA

    Renee Ryberg & Michael A. Schultz

  2. Department of Sociology, Purdue University, 700 W. State Street, West Lafayette, IN, 47907-2059, USA

    Shawn Bauldry

  3. Jacobs Center for Productive Youth Development, Universität Zürich, Andreasstrasse 15, CH-8050, Zürich, Switzerland

    Annekatrin Steinhoff & Michael Shanahan

  4. Soziologisches Institut, Universität Zürich, Andreasstrasse 15, CH-8050, Zürich, Switzerland

    Michael Shanahan

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  1. Renee Ryberg
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Correspondence to Renee Ryberg.

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The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Ethical Approval

This study was approved by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Institutional Review Board (15–3192). All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

Informed Consent

Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study by the German SOEP team.

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Ryberg, R., Bauldry, S., Schultz, M.A. et al. Personality and the Intergenerational Transmission of Educational Attainment: Evidence from Germany. J Youth Adolescence 46, 2181–2193 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10964-017-0704-6

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