Your best friend's mom ...

[Bootstrap]

https://daily.jstor.org/your-best-friends-mom/

Parents, teachers, and family income affect educational and life outcomes for teenagers, but so does their best friend’s mother.

It’s no surprise that parents and teachers affect educational and life outcomes for kids. But the sources of significant influence on young people go beyond that, with research from Hua-Yu Sebastian Cherng, Jessica McCrory Calarco, and Grace Kao finding one surprising category: friends’ mothers.

The result: teens whose best friend’s mother was college-educated were 60 percent more likely to complete college themselves. (It mattered much more if a teen’s own mother had a college degree, yielding 230 percent greater odds of completing college, but that’s less surprising.) The effect of a friend’s mom’s education held up even when controlling for the resources of the teens’ own families.

Family income had a similar, but smaller, effect: the friend’s family income would have to go up by $100,000 to produce the same effect as the friend’s mother having a four-year college degree or beyond.

[barnhart]

Which is another way of measuring how integrated a child's community is into the economy.

[Ken]

In my experience, the "best friends" of most college educated women are likely to either be (1) their best friend from college, or (2) their best friend from work. And if college educated women are working in a profession that requires a college degree (healthcare, nursing, education, corporate business, etc.) then their work friends are also going to be college educated.

So this is just a convoluted way to say that if your mother is college educated, then you are likely go to to college as well.

There is also a parental peer pressure effect that I see every day as a teacher. Parents who associate with or travel in college educated peer groups parents are going to feel much more pressure about getting their own kids into college. Every time I am at some social setting with other college educated parents of HS kids the conversation inevitably turns to "where are your kids going to college, what colleges are they applying to, what kid of admissions counselor are you using, what are your kids doing this summer to gain experiences for their college applications, what AP classes are your kids taking and how many AP classes are enough, how many times are your kids going to take the SAT, are you using private test prep classes", etc. etc. etc.

[ohio jones]

In my experience, the "best friends" of most college educated women are likely to either be (1) their best friend from college, or (2) their best friend from work. And if college educated women are working in a profession that requires a college degree (healthcare, nursing, education, corporate business, etc.) then their work friends are also going to be college educated.

The OP is not about your best friend's mom's best friends.

[JohnH]

This is a rather convoluted way to measure social class.

[Ken]

In my experience, the "best friends" of most college educated women are likely to either be (1) their best friend from college, or (2) their best friend from work. And if college educated women are working in a profession that requires a college degree (healthcare, nursing, education, corporate business, etc.) then their work friends are also going to be college educated.

The OP is not about your best friend's mom's best friends.

Yea, my mistake. I misread. It isn't your mom's best friend went to college, it is your best friend's mom went to college.

But either way the data point is equally trite. This isn't some first-person anecdote, it is just looking at survey averages. And the fact is that if your best friend's mom went to college then it is very likely that your best friend also went to college. And if your best friend went to college it means you were probably in a friend group of kids who went to college. Which probably means you lived in a middle class (or higher) neighborhood and went to middle class (or higher) schools, and took college prep (AP) type classes and were generally part of the middle class college pipeline.

It is about cause and effect. The fact that your best friend's mom went to college didn't cause you to go to college. It is simply a reflection of the fact that if you attended college and had a college-bound friend group then their parents likely went to college as well. Which is a completely obvious and trite observation about class in modern America.

[Robert]

This is a rather convoluted way to measure social class.

Some of the reason for low birth rate and the collapse of the nuclear family is the push for so many people, especially women, to go to college. 18-25 is a prime time to have children. This is being pushed off because society has convinced so many women that they need to have a career. The most important career is being a parent, for men and women. College is fine for women who are really smart or have a strong desire to enter some field. For most women, being a mother is much more important. Most college degrees that women get are pretty much a waste of money because few actually pursue their degree field.

This is just one more step and attempt to disrupt the nuclear family.

[JohnH]

This is a rather convoluted way to measure social class.

Some of the reason for low birth rate and the collapse of the nuclear family is the push for so many people, especially women, to go to college. 18-25 is a prime time to have children. This is being pushed off because society has convinced so many women that they need to have a career. The most important career is being a parent, for men and women. College is fine for women who are really smart or have a strong desire to enter some field. For most women, being a mother is much more important. Most college degrees that women get are pretty much a waste of money because few actually pursue their degree field.

This is just one more step and attempt to disrupt the nuclear family.

I have an acquaintance who has a degree in something like philosophy. His wife got a degree in some kind of education.

She is now a mom, and he is struggling to find and retain work - doing construction type work. (There aren’t many job openings for philosophers.) They are both heavily burdened by student loans.

If he had been doing construction work since his teens, and his wife preparing to be a wife and mother, they would be in much less debt and he would be earning a lot more - or perhaps even at the point of having his own construction business.

[Bootstrap]

The study was limited to things like college education. But I suspect it applies to other things as well. In general, I would like my children to spend their time with friends whose mothers have life wisdom and care about the right things.

[Ken]

This is a rather convoluted way to measure social class.

Some of the reason for low birth rate and the collapse of the nuclear family is the push for so many people, especially women, to go to college. 18-25 is a prime time to have children. This is being pushed off because society has convinced so many women that they need to have a career. The most important career is being a parent, for men and women. College is fine for women who are really smart or have a strong desire to enter some field. For most women, being a mother is much more important. Most college degrees that women get are pretty much a waste of money because few actually pursue their degree field.

This is just one more step and attempt to disrupt the nuclear family.

Then how to you explain the fact that college educated people have much higher marriage rates as well as lower divorce rates than non-college educated?

One of the single biggest factors to predict whether men and women will get married and stay married in this country is whether or not they have a college education.