College graduates who receive direct financial support from their parents have greater career success, according to a new study.

“The question underlying this work was whether parental support gives adult children an advantage or hinders their development,” Anna Manzoni, an associate professor of sociology at North Carolina State University and author of the study, said in a statement.

Manzoni surveyed data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) on 7,542 U.S. adults between the ages of 18 and 28.

Conducted by the University of Michigan, PSID has been gathering data on a nationally representative sample of over 18,000 individuals since 1968. Since the data has been collected from participants over time, it allows researchers to track an individual’s occupational status by reviewing the average education and income of people in a particular occupation.

After reviewing the data, Manzoni found a prominent trend among college graduates.

Specifically, she found that college graduates who received money directly from their parents did very well professionally, while college graduates whose parents couldn’t provide them with money but allowed them to live at home had a much lower occupational status.

“By using models that account for other individual and family-level variables, I found that parental assistance could help or hinder young people, depending on the nature of the assistance,” Manzoni said in a statement.

Though the paper doesn’t specifically address why this trend is happening, Marzoni has some theories.

“One possible reason could be that residential support constraints ​geographical mobility so youth are disincentivized from moving where good jobs are,” she said. “Direct monetary transfers instead support other types of activity, among which include personal investments, opening up further opportunities.”

Manzoni believes that the study highlights one way social inequality is carried out generationally.  

Since the study suggests that occupational status for college graduates is linked to direct financial support from parents, graduates whose families have a higher disposable income may have a stronger edge after college.

Manzoni calls it a “Catch-22” as most families want to help their kids, but not all have the resources to offer the most productive support.  

“This research is important because it contributes to our understanding of youth development and the transition to adulthood, as well as of social inequality,” said Manzoni. “It is unprecedented in assessing the effect of different types of parental material support on young adults’ occupational status, which is particularly relevant as early occupational trajectories are critical to future development. It also highlights how differences in access to parental resources and in their impact on youths’ success may reproduce and even amplify social inequality.”

​The paper, “Parental Support and Youth Occupational Attainment: Help or Hindrance?”, is published in the Journal of Youth and Adolescence.