Educational mobility across three generations of American women

• We estimate educational transmission across three generations in the 20th century US.
• Multigenerational transmission strength exceeds the predictions of AR(1) models.
• This finding is replicated across two independent data sets.
• Potential transmission mechanisms are discussed.

We analyze the intergenerational transmission of education in a three-generation sample of women from the 20th century US. We find strong three-generation educational persistence, with the association between the education of grandmothers and their granddaughters approximately two times stronger than would be expected under the type of first-order autoregressive transmission structure that has been assumed in much of the existing two-generation mobility literature. These findings are robust to using alternative empirical specifications and sample constructions, and are successfully replicated in a second independently drawn data set. Analyses that include males in the youngest and oldest generations produce very similar estimates. A variety of potential mechanisms linking the educational outcomes of grandparents and grandchildren are discussed and where possible tested empirically.