Parental separation penalties among university students in Italy

Abstract This paper addresses the long-standing question of whether parental separation shapes offspring school performance drawing on retrospective data from a group of university students in Italy, a country that has historically had very low separation rates yet has experienced an important rise in family dissolution over the last two decades. Using survey data from 1st-year enrollees in undergraduate courses in Economics and Statistics at two points in time (2000 and 2017), we explore whether the association between parental separation and children’s school performance (i) is observed both at the level of middle school (MS) and high school (HS); (ii) varies according to the age at which students experienced separation, and (iii) varies by parental socio-economic status (SES). Our results suggest that students whose parents separated before MS completion score on average 2 points less on the end-of-middle-school exam relative to students whose parents did not separate or separated after MS completion. Similarly, students whose parents separated before HS completion score 1 point less on the end-of-high-school exam relative to their counterpart. As such, we document a parental separation penalty both at the level of MS and HS, yet lower by half when separation occurs later in students’ life course. Moreover, for HS grade parental separation is associated with more negative consequences when students experience it at very young ages (0–5), while for MS grade heterogeneity by age is less clear-cut. Such penalties are concentrated among children of low-educated mothers, particularly for HS, providing support to the “compensatory advantage” hypothesis predicting smaller penalties for children of high-SES parents. Overall, findings from this study corroborate existing evidence suggesting that the consequences of parental separation vary depending on a combination of social background and the “selectivity” of the educational outcome considered.