Teens Coming From Single-Parent Homes Receive Less Education

New findings conducted by researchers at New York University, the University of California-Irvine and the University of Chicago suggest that those in single-parent families receive fewer years of schooling and may also be less likely to get a bachelor's degree by the age of 24 than those coming from a two-parent family.

Researchers estimated the relationship between adolescents' family situations and their future educational attainment, with study results suggesting that the educational gap between young adults who lived in single-parent families and those who lived in two-parent families widened substantially between 1968 and 2009.

"The negative relationship between living with a single parent and educational attainment has grown since the time Moynihan's report was published, which is troubling," said study author Kathleen M. Ziol-Guest, research associate professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at NYU's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, in a news release. "In other words, American children raised in single-parent homes appear to be at a greater disadvantage educationally than ever before."

For the study, researchers collected and analyzed data from the U.S. Department of Labor's Panel study of Income Dynamics that tracked the educational and economic life cycle of families and their children who were teens between 1968 and 1999.

As the number of years of school completed increased over time with both single- and two-parent families, teens from single-family homes received fewer years of schooling over that time period and the gap between the two groups widened from 0.63 years for those who were age 24 in 1978 to 1.32 years for those who were age 24 in 2009, with the widening accelerating in the 1990s.

Furthermore, researchers found that data revealed a disparity in college graduation rates. For instance, during the 1980s, the likelihood of graduating from college was about 8 percentage points less among those who lived in single-parent families than peers with two-parent families. Yet in the 11-year period ending in 2009, the gap more than doubled to 17 percentage points, with other factors affecting educational attainment that included a mother's age, education and number of siblings.