The Effect of Grandparents' Economic, Cultural and Social Capital on Grandchildren's Educational Success

This paper analyzes the effects of grandparents’ economic, cultural, and social capital on grandchildren’s educational success. We analyze data from Denmark and hypothesize that grandparents’ economic capital should be of little importance in the Scandinavian context, while their cultural and social capital should be relatively more important. Our results partly confirm these hypotheses since, after controlling for parents’ capital, we find that grandparents’ cultural capital (but not their economic and social capital) has a positive effect on the likelihood that grandchildren choose the academic track in upper secondary education over the vocational track or no education. These results suggest that, at least in the Scandinavian context, the ways in which grandparents affect grandchildren’s educational success is via transmission of non-economic resources.