Research shows negative associations between living in single-parent or stepparent families and average academic outcomes. But some children from non-traditional family structures are successful, such as those who enroll in college. Such students may be well suited to handle transitions to college because of their experience handling family transitions. By contrast, characteristics of non-traditional family structures generally associated with lower academic performance may persist into the collegiate context. We use the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth-1997 Cohort to compare first-term college GPA for students from two-biological-parent, single-parent, and stepparent families. We employ data from the NLSY97 Post-Secondary Transcript Data (NLSY97-PST) (N = 3346) and regression analyses to test the degree to which three competing theoretical perspectives––resources, family structure selectivity processes, or student resilience factors––might explain potential differences in college performance. Students from single-parent and stepparent families perform worse in their first collegiate semester than their peers from two-biological-parent families. Resources and selectivity factors explain differences for students from single-parent families, but explaining differences for students from stepparent families requires accounting for resilience factors as well.
