Parents’ education is widely considered one of the strongest predictors of children’s academic achievement. But a new study by the Shoresh Institution for Socioeconomic Research found that what parents do for a living predicts their children’s school performance more than twice as strongly as their education.
The study found relatively high achievement among children whose fathers work in science, research and technology, while relatively low scores were found among children whose mothers work as early-childhood educators or teaching assistants.
Parents’ jobs predict children’s grades better than education, Israeli study finds
(Photo: Tomer Shunam Halevi)
Researchers Ariela Savin and economics professors Ayal Kimhi and Dan Ben-David based the study on data from more than 10,000 Israeli 15-year-olds who took PISA tests between 2012 and 2022.
They examined the relationship between parents’ occupations and children’s achievement after accounting for parental education and a range of other background characteristics, and calculated how much each factor contributed to explaining differences in student performance.
Parents’ occupations accounted for about 45% of the explained achievement gaps, more than double the roughly 21% attributed to parental education.
Within occupation, the father’s profession had a particularly large role, accounting for about 33% of the explained gaps, compared with 12% for the mother’s occupation.
For education, the pattern was reversed. Mothers’ education accounted for about 17% of the explained gaps, while fathers’ education accounted for just 4%.
The father’s occupation was associated with children’s achievement across all three PISA subjects: reading, mathematics and science. Among mothers, the relationship was most pronounced in reading.
Children whose fathers worked in academia, science and research posted particularly high results, scoring 7.3% above the reference occupational group. Those whose fathers worked in technology, information and software scored 6.8% higher.
Higher achievement was also found among children whose fathers worked in advanced engineering professions, at 5% above the reference group; finance, accounting and economics, at 4.2%; and health and medicine, at 3.7%.
By contrast, children whose mothers worked as early-childhood educators scored 4.6% below the reference group, while those whose mothers worked as teaching assistants scored 2.2% lower. These were the only two occupational categories in which a statistically significant negative gap was found.
Prof. Ayal Kimhi, vice president of the Shoresh Institution and one of the study’s authors, said several factors could help explain the findings.
“High-quality occupations may indicate high-quality education among the parents,” he said. “In addition, they lead to higher income, and that also matters.”
Kimhi said the findings underscore the unequal starting points children bring into the education system.
“Children enter the education system from different starting points, and the system’s role is to reduce those gaps as much as possible,” he said. “Without that, it is difficult to talk about equal opportunity and intergenerational mobility.”