Find the right one: educational assortative mating and educational reproduction in Germany

Social stratification scholarship has provided important insights into the relationship between the socioeconomic characteristics of parents and children but ignored that a generation of potential parents that does not reproduce itself biologically does not transmit its characteristics. Demographic processes are involved, such as selection into couple, assortative mating and fertility. A recent stream of research has proposed to study processes of educational reproduction starting from a generation of potential parents and observing their partnership and fertility trajectories. We enlarge the existing literature focusing on the role of assortative mating in the German context. Our results show how educational reproduction manifests differently for men and women. For women to pass on a degree to the next generation, assortative mating is crucial and shapes how the chances of having a child with a degree are distributed. A premium for female hypergamy persists across generations, whereas the penalty for hypogamy found in an older cohort did not persist to a younger one. These results suggest the need to focus not only on fertility as a demographic pathway by which the distribution of family characteristics are shaped, but also on the combination of partner characteristics.