A Little Help from My Friend's Parents: Intergenerational Closure and Educational Outcomes

Abstract

Coleman's theory of social capital predicts that students who have high levels of intergenerational closure -that is, whose parents know more of their children's friends' parents- will have better educational outcomes than will students with low levels of intergenerational closure. This study used data from the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988 to test whether intergenerational closure affects children's educational outcomes. The main findings were that closure was positively associated with mathematics achievement, but not significantly associated with achievement in any other subject, closure was not significantly associated with 12th-grade grade point averages, and students with more closure were less likely to drop out of high school by the 12th grade.