Why? Because it changes family involvement in children’s educational activities
The News Story – Free community college education bill a potential “game changer” for state
A new bill proposing that Kentucky cover the costs of community and technical college education for qualified students has just passed through
committee in the state legislature.
The Work Ready Kentucky Program “can be a game changer for a lot of families,” according to Southcentral Kentucky Community and Technical
College President Phillip Neal. “This opens the door to higher education to people across the state who for financial reasons can’t access
college.” The bill now faces difficult hurdles on its road to law—most particularly Kentucky’s already severe budget difficulties.
But while free community college may sound like a perfect solution for workplace shortages, for example—the problem that Kentucky lawmakers
cite as incentive for the bill—it will go only so far in encouraging students to graduate. Research reveals that far more powerful factors
may be at play in students’ decisions whether to attend college.
The New Research – Losing Dad, losing ambition
Sociologists have known for some time that children of divorced parents fall short in their educational attainments, when compared to peers from
intact families. A prime reason for this deficiency comes to light in a study recently completed at the University of Oslo in Norway: children
who lose a parent (usually their father) through divorce also often lose their educational ambition.
In beginning their inquiry into how parental divorce affects educational ambitions, the Oslo scholars fully anticipate that family breakup
might cool young people’s ardor for pursuing a college degree. After all, they remark, “A family composed of two biological parents is considered
to have an optimal family environment for children.” Elaborating, the researchers stress that “each of the biological parents is an important
resource of emotional support, practical assistance, information and guidance.” But when parents part through divorce, children lose some of
these critical resources. Typically, such parental divorce “deprives children . . . of the opportunity to get a male role model, because usually
the father leaves the household.” The father’s absence, the researchers explain, “strongly contributes to the change in parent practices and
family involvement in children’s educational activities” experienced after the divorce.
But in this new study, the researchers focus not on how parental divorce affects educational attainment but rather on how it affects educational
ambition. To gauge the impact of parental divorce on educational ambition, the researchers pore over data collected from two samples of 18-
and-19-year-old Norwegian adolescents, the first (from a prospective study) comprising 1,861 young men and women and the second (from a cross-sectional
study) comprising 2,391.
The data from both samples provide clear evidence that parental divorce dampens educational drive. Among the young people surveyed in the
prospective study, those who had experienced a late parental divorce were almost twice as likely as peers from intact families to drop plans
for college or university education, becoming “undecided” as to their educational future (Odds Ratio of 1.8). The statistical linkage between
parental divorce and diminished educational ambitions likewise shows up in the cross-sectional data, which establish that “adolescents who
experienced parental divorce during childhood or adolescence were more likely to have undecided educational ambition, compared to their peers
from continuously married parents (O[dds]R[atio] 1.3).”
“In conclusion,” the Oslo scholars write, “experience of parental divorce seems to be associated with undecided educational ambition among
18/19 year-old adolescents.”
Though their data all come from Norway, the researchers’ findings align with those of a 2007 study involving “a large sample of Canadian adolescents
. . . report[ing] that adolescents from single-parent families had lower educational ambitions than those from two-parent families.” The results
of this new Norwegian study also parallel those of a 2007 study finding that “non-intact family structure variables were negatively associated
with the decision to continue education” among children and adolescents in Sweden and the United States.
Seeking to translate their findings into public-policy implications, the researchers reason that “mechanisms that reduce the adverse influence
of parental divorce on educational ambitions need to be in place.”
Isn’t it past time to stop looking for mechanisms reducing the adverse influence of parental divorce and to start looking for reforms actually
preventing parental divorce from happening in the first place? It is such reforms—legal and cultural—that will most help to ensure
that young people do not give up on their educational dreams.
(Source: Bryce J. Christensen and Nicole M. King, “New Research,” The Family in America 30.1 [Winter 2016]. Study: Henok Zeratsion et al., “The Influence of Parental Divorce on Educational Ambitions of 18/19
Year-Old Adolescents from Oslo, Norway,”Journal of Child and Family Studies 24.10 [2015]: 2,865-73.)
This article has been republished with permission from The Family in America, a publication of The Howard Center. The Howard Center is a MercatorNet partner site.
