Daughter's college completion and parents' psychosocial wellbeing: quasi-experimental evidence from South Korea

The educational achievements of offspring are reported to be positively associated with the wellbeing of older parents, although observational research on this topic is likely subject to residual confounding bias. We use data on over 7,000 older adults who responded to the Korean Longitudinal Study on Aging (KLoSA), a population-based study that captures data on the wellbeing and family dynamics of adults 45 years along with detailed rosters of respondents' living children, including their age and educational attainment. We use these rosters to characterize offspring exposure to a 1993 higher education reform that increased college enrollment rates, particularly for young women, by over 45 percentage points over a decade. Prior research has leveraged this reform to identify the causal effects of college completion on women's fertility and labor market outcomes; we similarly demonstrate its utility as a natural experiment in our study, showing a meaningful discontinuity in the college completion of respondents' daughters based on exposure to the reform. We show that college completion among daughters reduced the risk of depression for older parents by 6–25% (with variation by parents' gender and model specification) but had no effects on ratings of life satisfaction. The returns to offspring college completion were most pronounced for older mothers, parents in living urban regions and those with fewer of their own household assets. Daughter's college completion also had an impact on some domains of intergenerational support that could explain effects on depressive symptoms, including the frequency of parent-child contact.