The Impact of Financial and Cultural Resources on Educational Attainment in the Netherlands

Abstract

Collins's and Bourdieu's conflict theories of educational stratification are elaborated into two testable hypotheses. One hypothesis states that the effects of parents' financial resources on children's educational attainment have decreased; the other states that the effects of parents' cultural resources have increased. I estimate linear structural models in which the educational attainment of the two oldest siblings in a family is predicted by social background and by indicators of parents' financial and cultural resources. Cohort comparisons show that the influence of financial resources has disappeared since 1950 and that the influence of cultural resources, which was small before 1950, became even smaller after 1950. The association between parents' participation in high culture and children's educational attainment proves to be spurious.