Educational stratification among Arabs and Jews in Israel: historical disadvantage, discrimination, and opportunity

Arabs in Israel are a heterogeneous but largely underprivileged minority with a history of disadvantage in several domains, including education and employment. In this paper, we document changes in their attainment of various educational levels across cohorts born from the mid-1920s to the 1970s. We make comparisons among different Arab religious groups, between men and women, and between Arabs and the majority Jewish populations in Israel. We find that over consecutive birth cohorts, substantial ethnic differences in educational attainment have narrowed at the lower levels of schooling, but have increased at higher levels. Moreover, the results indicate that the disadvantage of Muslim Arabs in terms of entry into and completion of high school can be accounted for only partially by differences in the social status of their parents and characteristics of their neighbourhoods. The findings suggest that long-term historical differences among groups and discriminatory practices towards Arabs are important factors in explanations of disparities in educational attainment.     

Does Black Socioeconomic Mobility Explain Recent Progress Toward Black-White Residential Integration?

Studies of racial residential segregation have found that black-white segregation in U.S. metropolitan areas has declined slowly but steadily since the early 1970s. As of this writing, black-white residential segregation in the United States is approximately 25 % lower than it was in 1970. To identify the sources of this decline, we used individual-level, geocoded data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) to compare the residential attainment of different cohorts of blacks. We analyzed these data using Blinder-Oaxaca regression decomposition techniques that partition the decline in residential segregation among cohorts into the decline resulting from (1) changes in the social and economic characteristics of blacks and (2) changes in the association between blacks’ social and economic characteristics and the level of residential segregation they experience. Our findings show that black cohorts entering adulthood prior to the civil rights movement of the 1960s experienced consistently high levels of residential segregation at middle age, but that cohorts transitioning to adulthood during and after this period of racial progress experienced significantly lower levels of residential segregation. We find that the decline in black-white residential segregation for these later cohorts reflects both their greater social and economic attainment and a strengthening of the association between socioeconomic characteristics and residential segregation. Educational gains for the post–civil rights era cohorts and improved access to integrated neighborhoods for high school graduates and college attendees in these later cohorts were the principal source of improved residential integration over this period.     

Displaced and segregated: The socio-economic status of the second generation of internally displaced Palestinians in Israel

This study investigates the effects of displacement on the socio-economic status of second-generation Palestinian internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Israel. The results show that members of this group do not differ from non-displaced Palestinians in their educational or occupational attainment, but that displaced households experience higher rates of poverty and poorer housing conditions than non-displaced households. I find that the relationship between displacement and the prime indicators of social mobility—education and jobs—was weakened by three factors: extreme spatial segregation between Palestinians and Jews, the concentration of disadvantage among Palestinian IDPs within the host communities, which were Palestinian spaces, and a high level of dependence on resources concentrated in Jewish spaces among all Palestinians, not just IDPs. These three conditions, however, do not eliminate gaps in assets and land ownership between IDPs and non-displaced Palestinians, which, I argue, contribute to higher poverty rates among displaced households.     

Determinants of Educational Attainment in Rural Thailand: A Life Course Approach

Using data from rural Thailand, we examine the determinants of educational attainment of school-age children. We organize our analysis around three central principles of the life course perspective: the embeddedness of lives in historical time and place, linked or interconnected lives, and the timing of lives. We examine these principles using comparisons within cohorts and between cohorts. We find that educational attainment is related to a combination of factors related to each of these principles. Specifically, despite a serious economic downturn occurring midway through our study, we nonetheless found that educational levels were higher following the downturn than preceding it. Interconnections to parents and siblings also affected educational outcomes, as did the timing of life events such as migration, marriage, and childbearing. For the latter, mother??s education and migration both positively affected educational attainment. For the former, having more siblings, both those in the household and those migrating, reduced education.     

Growing Wealth Gaps in Education

Prior research on trends in educational inequality has focused chiefly on changing gaps in educational attainment by family income or parental occupation. In contrast, this contribution provides the first assessment of trends in educational attainment by family wealth and suggests that we should be at least as concerned about growing wealth gaps in education. Despite overall growth in educational attainment and some signs of decreasing wealth gaps in high school attainment and college access, I find a large and rapidly increasing wealth gap in college attainment between cohorts born in the 1970s and 1980s, respectively. This growing wealth gap in higher educational attainment co-occurred with a rise in inequality in children’s wealth backgrounds, although the analyses also suggest that the latter does not fully account for the former. Nevertheless, the results reported here raise concerns about the distribution of educational opportunity among today’s children who grow up in a context of particularly extreme wealth inequality.     

The Gender‐Gap Reversal in Education and Its Effect on Union Formation: The End of Hypergamy?

Newly released census microdata reveal the nearly worldwide and substantial decline in educational hypergamy (women marrying men with higher educational attainment) across 56 countries from the 1970s to the 2000s. We examine the extent to which the observed decrease in hypergamy is connected to the worldwide rise in female educational attainment. Our results show that educational hypergamy is an enduring form of gender inequality in union formation across the countries examined but that it has been decreasing over the last few decades and in some countries has reversed in recent years. Overall, we find a strong association between hypergamy and gender differences in educational attainment. Societies in which the female educational advantage is greater tend to have lower levels of educational hypergamy. There is a tendency toward a joint increase in women's educational levels and a decrease in educational hypergamy. This article underlines the influence of women's educational opportunities on the increase in gender symmetry in assortative mating, which leads us to predict the end of educational hypergamy.     

Multistate projections by level of education for Portugal, 2011–2031

Educational attainment is an attribute that leads to a great distinction between the members of a population, including when considering their health and well-being, which are features to pursue within an aging society. The aim of this work was to produce demographic projections for the Portuguese population by sex, age group and level of educational attainment, for the period 2011–2031. Considering fertility, mortality and migration differentials by level of education, the population was projected using the multistate cohort-component method with a block Leslie matrix. Two scenarios were considered, one where educational attainment before 2011 remains constant and another in which educational attainment will follow the trend observed over the last decade, being the trend in the state proportion modelled using continuation ratio models. The results show an increase in the proportion of individuals who complete higher educational levels in almost all age groups of both sexes. Among women, only 13.6 % had completed some level of higher education in 2011, a figure that will rise to approximately 23.4 % in 2031, whereas among men this value was only 9.7 % and will also rise by 2031, reaching 15.5 %. We can expect the proportion of people with higher educational levels to continue to rise as the education of younger cohorts seems to evolve positively. This work will be particularly useful to study how the aging population and the rising levels of education can contribute to the planning and monitoring of public policies, although these findings can also be used in other research contexts.     

Does teenage childbearing reduce investment in human capital?

This paper estimates the causal effect of teenage childbearing on educational attainment using two cohorts of Australian twins and their relatives. Our main finding is that the negative effect of teenage childbearing on educational attainment appears to be small. We find no difference in educational attainment between teen mothers and their identical twin sisters. Data on the relatives of the twins enable us to compare a teen mother with both her twin sister and her other sibling sisters. When twin sisters are used as a control group instead of sibling sisters, the estimated difference in educational attainment is much smaller.     

The 1960s: A decade of progress for blacks?

Between 1960 and 1970 blacks, as well as whites, improved their socioeconomic status. Among both races, educational attainment increased, the occupational distribution was upgraded, and real purchasing power rose markedly. In almost every comparison, the gains were somewhat greater among blacks than among whites and thus most indicators of racial differentiation declined. Nevertheless, the changes of this decade failed to eliminate racial differences with regard to socioeconomic status. In all comparisons, except for the income of certain groups of women, blacks were at a disadvantage when compared to whites both at the start and at the end of this decade, and very large racial differences remain. Further socioeconomic progress by blacks during the 1970s will probably not eliminate racial differences. The article concludes by relating the socioeconomic trends to such other aspects of race relations as integration, governmental policy, and the attitudes of whites and blacks.     

Increasingly heterogeneous ages at first birth by education in Southern European and Anglo-American family-policy regimes: A seven-country comparison by birth cohort

According to the 'reproductive polarization' hypothesis, family-policy regimes unfavourable to the combination of employment with motherhood generate greater socio-economic differentials in fertility than other regimes. This hypothesis has been tested mainly for 'liberal' Anglo-American regimes. To investigate the effects elsewhere, we compared education differentials in age at first birth among native-born women of 1950s and 1960s birth cohorts in seven countries representing three regime types. Women with low educational attainment have continued to have first births early, not only in Britain and the USA but also in Greece, Italy, and Spain. Women at all other levels of education have experienced a shift towards later first births, a shift that has been largest in Southern Europe. Unlike the educationally heterogeneous changes in age pattern at first birth seen under the Southern European and Anglo-American family-policy regimes, the changes across birth cohorts in the study's two 'universalistic' countries, Norway and France, have been educationally homogeneous.     

Insight into ethnic flux: Marriage patterns among jews of mixed ancestry in Israel

Increases in ethnic and racial intermarriage in immigrant countries have led to growing proportions of persons of mixed ancestry and backgrounds. The marriage patterns of these persons both reflect and affect the salience and meaning of current forms of ethnicity and race in these societies. This article analyzes the marriage behavior of children of ethnically mixed unions in the Jewish population of Israel. Among persons of mixed ancestry, educational attainment plays a large role in whether they marry Ashkenazim or less economically advantaged Mizrahim. Such patterns suggest that intermarriage in Israel does not necessarily reduce ethnic differences in socioeconomic status or the salience of ethnicity among disadvantaged groups.     

Self-selection and earnings assimilation: Immigrants from the former Soviet Union in Israel and the United States

Drawing on U.S. decennial census data and on Israeli census and longitudinal data, we compare the educational levels and earnings assimilation of Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union (FSU) in the United States and Israel during 1968-2000. Because the doors to both countries were practically open to FSU immigrants between 1968 and 1989, when FSU immigrants were entitled to refugee visas in the United States, the comparison can be viewed as a natural experiment in immigrants' destination choices. The results suggest that FSU immigrants to the United States are of significantly higher educational level and experience significantly faster rates of earnings assimilation in their new destination than their counterparts who immigrated to Israel. We present evidence that patterns of self-selection in immigration to Israel and the United States--on both measured and unmeasured productivity-related traits--is the main reason for these results. When the immigration regulations in the United States changed in 1989, and FSU Jewish immigrants to the United States had to rely on family reunification for obtaining immigrant visas, the adverse effects of the policy change on the type of FSU immigrants coming to the United States were minor and short-lived As early as 1992, the gaps in the educational levels between FSU immigrants coming to Israel and to the United States returned to their pre-1989 levels, and the differences in earnings assimilation of post-1989 immigrants in the United States and Israel are similar to the differences detected in the 1980s.     

Educational expansion and changes in occupational returns to education in Korea

We use data from the Korean Labor and Income Panel Study (KLIPS) conducted in 1998 by the Korean Labor Institute to examine the school-to-work transition across three labor market entry cohorts of Korean men and women. Taking into account the dramatic expansion of educational system and economic changes Korean society has experienced during the last few decades, we develop hypotheses about possible changes in the effects of educational qualifications on first occupational attainment. We first conduct an OLS regression of first occupational prestige scores on education. We then look at the effects of education on the odds of entering an occupational class using multinomial logit models. The results of the two analyses indicate that educational qualifications strongly affect occupational attainment for both men and women. The effects of education, particularly junior college and university, on first occupation have declined across three labor market cohorts for women but not for men.     

Decent Living Standards: Material Prerequisites for Human Wellbeing

Children whose parents experience adverse social, economic, or health-related living conditions are more likely to face similar types of disadvantage in their adult life. However, a limitation of many earlier studies is that they do not account for the multidimensionality of the concept of living conditions, and that the child generation’s life courses are targeted as static and independent from the societal context in which they are imbedded. The current investigation addressed these aspects by focusing on the complexity, duration, and timing of disadvantage with regard to how adverse circumstances in the family of origin are associated with trajectories of social, economic, and health-related living conditions across adulthood. We also examined the role of educational attainment for these associations. Analyses were based a Swedish cohort born in 1953 (n = 14,294). We first conducted sequence analysis, followed by hierarchical cluster analysis, to generate ‘outcome profiles’, i.e. trajectories of adult disadvantage. Second, several indicators of adverse circumstances in childhood were analysed by means of multinominal regression analysis, showing the odds of ending up in the different trajectories. The results indicated that individuals who grew up under adverse conditions were more likely to experience disadvantaged social, economic, and health-related trajectories. This was particularly the case for trajectories characterised by a high degree of complexity, i.e. coexisting disadvantages, and—among men only—by a longer duration of disadvantage. Educational attainment was identified as a powerful mediator, suggesting that efforts to increase equal educational opportunity may be a way of reducing the intergenerational transmission of disadvantage.     

From Privilege to Prevalence: Contextual Effects of Women’s Schooling on African Marital Timing

In Africa and elsewhere, educated women tend to marry later than their less-educated peers. Beyond being an attribute of individual women, education is also an aggregate phenomenon: the social meaning of a woman’s educational attainment depends on the educational attainments of her age-mates. Using data from 30 countries and 246 birth cohorts across sub-Saharan Africa, we investigate the impact of educational context (the percentage of women in a country cohort who ever attended school) on the relationship between a woman’s educational attainment and her marital timing. In contexts where access to education is prevalent, the marital timing of uneducated and highly educated women is more similar than in contexts where attending school is limited to a privileged minority. This across-country convergence is driven by uneducated women marrying later in high-education contexts, especially through lower rates of very early marriages. However, within countries over time, the marital ages of women from different educational groups tend to diverge as educational access expands. This within-country divergence is most often driven by later marriage among highly educated women, although divergence in some countries is driven by earlier marriage among women who never attended school.     

The effects of ethnicity and educational attainment on Jewish marriage patterns: Changes in Israel, 1957–1995

Abstract. This paper presents a study of changes in marriage patterns among the Jewish population of Israel over nearly 40 years. Using data from four Israeli Censuses spanning experience from the late 1950s to the mid 1990s, we employ Schoen's harmonic mean model in a multivariate framework to consider, simultaneously, changes over time in age-specific marriage rates by ethnicity and educational attainment. Our analyses point to a number of clear and interesting findings: (1) an increasingly positive association between marriage and educational attainment, especially for women; (2) the continuing central role of ethnicity in mate selection, despite important declines in ethnic endogamy over the period; (3) a decrease in the prominence of unions of ‘exchange’; (4) some evidence of increasing ‘block’ endogamy among Jews of Asian and African origin; and (5) a small increase in educational homogamy over the period. Interpretations and implications of these findings are discussed.     

Back to School: Racial and Gender Differences in Adults’ Participation in Formal Schooling, 1978–2013

Trends and gaps in educational attainment by race and gender have received much attention in recent years, but reports of these trends have generally focused on traditional-age college students. Little is known about whether and how enrollment in formal schooling among older adults (between 29 and 61 years old) has changed over time. In this article, I draw on Current Population Survey data from 1978 to 2013 to provide the most comprehensive analysis of trends in adults’ formal school enrollment by demographic group to date. Results indicate that adult black women in particular have seen relatively high growth rates in their enrollment. Black women were 85 % more likely to enroll in 2011 and 46 % more likely in 2013 than they were in 1978. Their growing advantage relative to other racial-gender groups owes largely to their increasing educational attainment rates overall, given the relationship between prior schooling and enrollment later in life. Taken together, this article’s findings suggest that adult enrollment is at once equalizing and disequalizing. On the one hand, it has the potential to narrow the gaps between those with some college experience and those with a four-year degree. On the other hand, patterns of adults’ participation in formal education are widening educational gaps between those with and without traditional-age college experience.     

Education and Male-Female Differences in Later-Life Cognition: International Evidence From Latin America and the Caribbean

This study explores the role of early-life education for differences in cognitive functioning between men and women aged 60 and older from seven major urban areas in Latin America and the Caribbean. After documenting statistically significant differences in cognitive functioning between men and women for six of the seven study sites, I assess the extent to which these differences can be explained by prevailing male-female differences in education. I decompose predicted male-female differences in cognitive functioning based on various statistical models for later-life cognition and find robust evidence that male-female differences in education are a major driving force behind cognitive functioning differences between older men and women. This study therefore suggests that early-life differences in educational attainment between boys and girls during childhood have a lasting impact on gender inequity in cognitive functioning at older ages. Increases in educational attainment and the closing of the gender gap in education in many countries in Latin America and the Caribbean may thus result in both higher levels and a more gender-equitable distribution of later-life cognition among the future elderly in those countries.     

The Significance of Education for Mortality Compression in the United States

Recent studies of old-age mortality trends assess whether longevity improvements over time are linked to increasing compression of mortality at advanced ages. The historical backdrop of these studies is the long-term improvement in a population's socioeconomic resources that fueled longevity gains. We extend this line of inquiry by examining whether socioeconomic differences in longevity within a population are accompanied by old-age mortality compression. Specifically, we document educational differences in longevity and mortality compression for older men and women in the United States. Drawing on the fundamental cause of disease framework, we hypothesize that both longevity and compression increase with higher levels of education and that women with the highest levels of education will exhibit the greatest degree of longevity and compression. Results based on the Health and Retirement Study and the National Health Interview Survey Linked Mortality File confirm a strong educational gradient in both longevity and mortality compression. We also find that mortality is more compressed within educational groups among women than men. The results suggest that educational attainment in the United States maximizes life chances by delaying the biological aging process.     

Two Decades of Negative Educational Selectivity of Mexican Migrants to the United States

Immigration is commonly considered to be selective of more educated individuals. Previous US studies comparing the educational attainment of Mexican immigrants in the United States to that of the Mexican resident population support this characterization. Upward educational‐attainment biases in both coverage and measurement, however, may be substantial in US data sources. Moreover, differences in educational attainment by place size are very large within Mexico, and US data sources provide no information on immigrants' places of origin within Mexico. To address these problems, we use multiple sources of nationally representative Mexican survey data to re‐evaluate the educational selectivity of working‐age Mexican migrants to the United States over the 1990s and 2000s. We document disproportionately rural and small‐urban‐area origins of Mexican migrants and a steep positive gradient of educational attainment by place size. We show that together these conditions induced strongly negative educational selection of Mexican migrants throughout the 1990s and 2000s. We interpret this finding as consistent with low returns to education among unauthorized migrants and few opportunities for authorized migration.