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.