Variation in Childhood Predictors of Educational Attainment across 22 Countries

Introduction Prior research documents strong associations between educational attainment with improved health and well-being outcomes. However, less is known about how childhood antecedents shape educational attainment in adulthood on a cross-national scale. Most studies on childhood antecedents of education have focused on the Western world with some breadth achieved in studies led by the OECD or UNESCO. However, there are still gaps in world regions in such studies. This work builds on existing analyses of childhood antecedents of educational attainment around the world by incorporating a range of childhood experiences, personal attributes, and familial or social circumstances.MethodsThis study presents an in-depth, cross-national investigation of educational attainment across cultures and how childhood circumstances predict attainment. Using a diverse and international dataset of 202,898 participants from 22 countries, we examine how childhood characteristics predict educational attainment; predictors include parental marital status, . Our results will also present how associations vary across countries reflecting diverse societal influences and E-values for robustness check against potential unmeasured confounding.ResultsFirst, how do various aspects of childhood predict educational attainment (completing 16+ years of education) in adulthood, for which the factor of subjective financial status growing up (`Found is very difficult`) had the most consistently large effect on the likelihood of obtaining high attainment (RR=0.67; 95% CI [0.56,0.81]). Second, do these associations vary by country/territory, with the association of subjective financial status, for example, being the strongest in Egypt (RR=-1.77; 95% CI [-2.67, -0.87]), and weakness (not different than zero) in several countries including the United States, Germany, and Nigeria. Third, are the observed associations robust to potential unmeasured confounding, as assessed by E-values, for which the effect of subjective financial status is robust up to an unmeasured confounder with E=2.34 with educational attainment. The substantial variation in the association between childhood predictors of educational attainment will be unpacked in our full paper.Conclusions These results provide new evidence for the cross-cultural dynamics of the childhood antecedents of educational attainment on a cross-national scale and provide the foundation for additional inquiry in future waves of the GFS. The findings enhance our understanding of early-life predictors of adult outcomes and provide valuable evidence for developing approaches to promoting educational attainment as a form of social growth.