Background: The models that have been used so far to describe the process underlying educational attainment have been almost always linear. Little research has been aimed at studying interactions among the determinants of educational attainment.
Aim: The aim of the study is to examine the interactions between parents' education, cognitive ability and educational expectations in determining educational attainment.
Sample: Participants were 8570 Americans who were born between 1957 and 1964.
Method: The information was taken from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. Information about parents' education, cognitive ability and educational expectations was taken from the 1979 survey. Information about educational attainment was taken from the 1991 survey.
Results: The findings indicate that there is an offsetting relationship between the education of the two parents in the formation of expectations, but not in the determination of attainment; and that, both for expectations and for attainment, the cognitive ability of the child has an offsetting relationship with mother's education but not with father's education. The findings also indicate that there is a synergistic relationship between cognitive ability and educational expectations in determining educational attainment.
Conclusions: There are theoretically meaningful interactions between the determinants of educational attainment. The pattern of these interactions capture some of the intricate psychological processes underlying the combined influence of background variables and children's characteristics on educational attainment.