Family Background and Educational Sucess in Denmark.

This research examines the role of family background variables in the determination of educational attainment in Denmark. A categorical representation of the highest level of education attained is the dependent variable. It is analyzed by procedures which take account of the presence of unobservable factors. Parent’s education and occupation along with a an indicator of ability which is represented by a set of intelligence tests explain a small but significant portion of the variation in their children’s’ educational success. Women are shown to respond differently to their environments than men and including intelligence test scores does not remove the need to deal with unmeasured attributes. This study examines the determinants of educational attainment of a sample of Danish students who were fourteen in 1968 and who participated in the 1968 Danish Longitudinal Survey of Youth. Attention focuses on factors involving the respondent’s social and economic background and the occupational and educational characteristics of the respondent’s parents.The paper has the following format. Introduction. The next section provides a brief review of the literature on educational attainments as well as some of the statistical procedures that have been used in its analysis. In section 3 Danish educational attainment data is analyzed using both ordered and unordered probability models model which are estimated by procedures which take into account the presence of unobservable factors. Our procedures are in the spirit of the work of Cameron and Heckman (1998), but are more general. Econometric issues and the results of what other Scandinavian researchers in this area have found are also discussed in section 4. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]