Educational attainment of the children of divorce: Australia, 1940–90

Much research suggests that the disruption of marriage through parental death or divorce imposes a small but significant educational disadvantage on American children, although the most recent and comprehensive analysis casts serious doubt on this claim. What is the situation in Australia? Using representative national samples (n= 29,443) and OLS and logistic regression with robust standard errors, we estimate models controlling many potentially confounding variables. We find that divorce in Australia costs seven-tenths of a year of education, mainly by reducing secondary school completion. Importantly, divorce has become more damaging in recent cohorts.