Building human capital: The impact of parents’ initial educational level and lifelong learning on their children

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to examine the impact of parents’ educational level on lifelong learning of children and relationship between parents’ and student’ lifelong learning including language skills and computer literacy. This intergenerational transmission, if proven, could influence the investments into the human capital in the long run. We used data from Adult Education Survey 2011 (AES) to test the hypothesis that the parental attained level of education has a significant impact on the initial educational level of their children as well as on their lifelong learning participation. Furthermore, using data from AES, we tested the association between parental educational level and children’s language skills and reading activity and between parental non-formal as well as informal education and students’ lifelong learning. We have found that the parental effect on lifelong learning participation is slightly weaker than the effect of initial adult’s education. Nevertheless, the intergenerational transmission mechanism obviously works. The relationship between parental and students computer literacy is statistically significant, nevertheless weak. As for the nominal and ordinal character of the data, we used mainly the standard statistical methods including nonparametric tests, logit model and correspondence analysis.