Black–white differences in social mobility in the past 30 years: A latent-class regression analysis

This article presents an analysis of racial differences in intergenerational occupational mobility using a novel latent-class regression model. The model distinguishes mobility patterns by membership in four latent classes, which are labeled as the “stable middle” class, the “downwardly mobile” (DM) class, the “upwardly mobile” (UM) class, and the “stable working” (SW) class, and this distinction provides new substantive insights into mobility analysis. Compared with whites, blacks are shown to be disadvantaged in two of the three elements of mobility chances that the distinction of these four latent classes identifies: a disadvantage coming from their poor status backgrounds, and a disadvantage coming from a significantly smaller chance of experiencing upward mobility than whites. On the other hand, blacks are not significantly more likely than whites to experience downward mobility. Changes in the black–white differences in mobility chances are also analyzed.     

Intergenerational education mobility of black and white South Africans

Using the October Household Surveys, we found that the intergenerational education mobility of whites is higher than that of blacks. Among blacks, females have a higher intergenerational education mobility than males, while the poorest have the lowest intergenerational education mobility. The lower education mobility of blacks than that of whites indicate that factors such as access to the credit market, as well as the availability and quality of schools, are important determinants of educational attainment. Interestingly, the cross section estimates of black intergenerational education mobility do not differ from those obtained by using pseudopanel data, which control for unobserved community effects. The views expressed here are those of the author and should not be associated with the African Development Bank, their members, or the countries they represent.     

Do all roads lead to Rome? Effect of educational trajectories on educational transitions

“Non-traditional” educational trajectories are increasingly common among American students. This study assesses the implications of this phenomenon for inequality in educational attainment. A proper account of educational trajectories requires simultaneous consideration of qualitatively different types of destinations within educational transitions, of the timing at which different transitions occur, and of the sequence of events within educational levels. To examine “traditional” and “non-traditional” pathways through post-secondary education, this study relies on detailed educational histories from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979–2002. Findings reveal that deviations from a traditional trajectory are widespread, are more frequent among students who enrolled in less selective colleges, and also among socioeconomically and academically disadvantaged students. Results show that following a “non-traditional” pathway reduces students’ chances to enroll in college and to complete a post-secondary degree. In the case of bachelor's degree completion, most of the observed gap among students from different socioeconomic backgrounds is accounted for the different trajectories students follow. This study demonstrates that a fine-grained analysis of students’ trajectories improves our understanding of the persistent socioeconomic disparities in educational attainment.     

A New Proposal to Gauge Intergenerational Mobility: Educational Mobility in Europe as a Case Study

This paper is aimed at presenting a new intergenerational mobility index that (a) combines the intergenerational elasticity and the R-squared of the intergenerational regression and (b) enables the expression of the total degree of mobility as the weighted sum of mobility with respect to both parents. As a case study, we apply our proposal to investigate the intergenerational mobility of education in several European countries and its changes across birth cohorts. The results derived from the proposed index indicate that Nordic countries display higher levels of educational mobility than Southern countries, whereas continental countries are in an intermediate position. Moreover, it appears that the degree of mobility increases over time only in those countries with low initial levels and remains stable for the most mobile countries. Finally, for most of the countries the proposed methodology can prove that the degree of educational mobility with respect to each parent tends to converge to the same level over the course of time.     

Are Daughters Like Mothers: Evidence on Intergenerational Educational Mobility Among Young Females in India

Taking data from the ‘India Youth Survey: Situation and Needs’ the paper examines intergenerational educational mobility for young females (vis-à-vis their mothers) in India. The paper uses transition/mobility matrices and mobility measures widely used in the literature on intergenerational mobility for the examination. The overall intergenerational educational mobility among the young females in India is about 0.69 (the upper limit being 1). The upwards component of the overall intergenerational educational mobility is 0.55 (that is, nearly four-fifth of the overall). Also, the intergenerational educational mobility is slightly higher in the ‘Scheduled Castes and Tribes (SC/ST)’ compared to the ‘Other Backward Castes (OBC)’ as well as ‘Others’ castes. But the upward mobility is substantially higher in the ‘Others’ caste group compared to SC/STs. The upward mobility among the OBCs is higher than that of SC/STs but lower than that of the ‘Others’ category. Also, the overall mobility as well as upward mobility is higher in urban areas. Moreover, there are large inter-state variations with the economically and demographically poorer states having substantially lower overall as well as upward mobility than the economically and demographically advanced states.     

Beyond Transmission: Intergenerational Patterns of Family Formation Among Middle-Class American Families

Research about parental effects on family behavior focuses on intergenerational transmission: that is, whether children show the same family behavior as their parents. This focus potentially overemphasizes similarity and obscures heterogeneity in parental effects on family behavior. In this study, we make two contributions. First, instead of focusing on isolated focal events, we conceptualize parents’ and their children’s family formation holistically as the process of union formation and childbearing between ages 15 and 40. We then discuss mechanisms likely to shape these intergenerational patterns. Second, beyond estimating average transmission effects, we innovatively apply multichannel sequence analysis to dyadic sequence data on middle-class American families from the Longitudinal Study of Generations (LSOG; N = 461 parent-child dyads). The results show three salient intergenerational family formation patterns among this population: a strong transmission, a moderated transmission, and an intergenerational contrast pattern. We examine what determines parents’ and children’s likelihood to sort into a specific intergenerational pattern. For middle-class American families, educational upward mobility is a strong predictor of moderated intergenerational transmission, whereas close emotional bonds between parents and children foster strong intergenerational transmission. We conclude that intergenerational patterns of family formation are generated at the intersection of macro-structural change and family internal psychological dynamics.     

Heterogeneity in the intergenerational transmission of educational attainment: evidence from Switzerland on natives and second-generation immigrants

This study applies rich data from the 2000 Swiss census to investigate the patterns of intergenerational education transmission for natives and second-generation immigrants. The level of secondary schooling attained by youth aged 17 is related to their parents’ educational outcomes based on data on the entire Swiss population. Extending economic theories of child educational attainment, we derive hypotheses regarding the patterns of intergenerational education transmission. The data yield substantial heterogeneity in intergenerational transmission across population groups. Only a small share of this heterogeneity is explained by the predictions of economic theory.

子女教育与家庭贫困的代际变动

子女教育是影响农村家庭贫困变动的一个重要因素。本文通过对14省区609户农村家庭调查结果分析,发现子女教育有加深父代家庭贫困状况的迹象,子女接受教育程度越高,自身一代家庭摆脱贫困的比例越高,并且能传承下代家庭使其免受贫困;家庭贫困代际变动的教育断裂点为15年(大专教育)。     

Can Increased Educational Attainment Among Lower-Educated Mothers Reduce Inequalities in Children’s Skill Development?

A rich tradition of stratification research has established a robust link between mothers’ education and the skills in children that forecast children’s own mobility. Yet, this research has failed to consider that many U.S. women are now completing their education after having children. Such a trend raises questions about whether increases in mothers’ educational attainment can improve their children’s skill development and whether these gains are enough to reduce inequalities in skills compared with children whose mothers completed the same degree before they were born. To answer these questions, we draw on a nationally representative sample of mothers and children participating in the National Longitudinal Surveys (NLSY79 and CNLY), random- and fixed-effects techniques, and repeated measures of children’s cognitive and noncognitive skills. Contrary to existing research and theory, our results reveal that educational attainment obtained after children’s births is not associated with an improvement in children’s skills. Such findings offer substantial refinement to a long-standing model of intergenerational mobility by suggesting that the intergenerational returns to mother’s education are weaker when education is acquired after children are born. Results also highlight the limits of two-generation policy approaches to reducing inequality in future generations.     

Educational Inequalities among Latin American Adolescents: Continuities and Changes over the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s

The goal of this paper is to examine recent trends in educational stratification for Latin American adolescents growing up in three distinct periods: the 1980s, during severe recession; the 1990s, a period of structural adjustments imposed by international organizations; and the late 2000s, when most countries in the region experienced positive and stable growth. In addition to school enrollment and educational transitions, we examine the quality of education through enrollment in private schools, an important aspect of inequality in education that most studies have neglected. We use nationally representative household survey data for the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s in Brazil, Chile, Mexico and Uruguay. Our overall findings confirm the importance of macroeconomic conditions for inequalities in educational opportunity, suggesting important benefits brought up by the favorable conditions of the 2000s. However, our findings also call attention to increasing disadvantages associated with the quality of the education adolescents receive, suggesting the significance of the EMI framework-Effectively Maintained Inequality-and highlighting the value of examining the quality in addition to the quantity of education in order to fully understand educational stratification in the Latin American context.     

A neo-classical education transitions approach: A corrected tale for three cohorts

Analysts have regarded education transitions research as revealing late stage educational egalitarianism in the United States (e.g., Stolzenberg, 1994) and as sufficiently robust to guide policymakers (e.g., Hout, 2007). However, critics suggest parameter estimates are contaminated by selection bias (e.g., De Graaf & Ganzeboom, 1993), key parameter differences are unidentified (e.g., Cameron & Heckman, 1998), cross-transition comparisons are faulty, and the data are inappropriate. Useful modifications have been offered, (e.g., [Breen and Jonsson, 2000], [Hauser and Andrew, 2006] and [Lucas, 2001]), but analysts have yet to comprehensively address the challenges critics pose. In response, we propose a neo-classical education transitions approach that uses fuller sets of data and models that explicitly address the primary threats to proper inference. Using this approach we re-assess the educational attainment process for a baby boomer cohort, a Generation X cohort, and a Generation Y cohort. All cohorts fail to replicate the waning coefficients pattern. Methodologically, the study responds to criticisms in a way that offers methods for continued cross-national comparative research. Substantively, the study undermines confidence that standard education transitions research can provide policy guidance and the claim of late stage egalitarianism in the United States educational attainment process.     

Intergenerational mobility in the post-1965 immigration era: Estimates by an immigrant generation cohort method

The new second generation of the post-1965 immigration era is observed as children with their parents in 1980 and again as adults 25 years later. Intergenerational mobility is assessed for both men and women in four major racial/ethnic groups, both in regard to children’s status attainment relative to parents and with regard to the rising societal standards proxied by native-born non-Hispanic whites. A profile of intergenerational mobility is prepared using multiple indicators of status attainment: high school and college completion, upper white-collar occupation, poverty, and homeowner ship. The immigrant generation cohort method we introduce accounts for four distinct temporal dimensions of immigrant progress, clarifying inconsistencies in the literature and highlighting differences in mobility between racial/ethnic groups and with respect to different outcome measures. The immigrant generation cohort method consistently finds greater intergenerational mobility than suggested by alternative approaches. Our analysis also shows that the intergenerational progress of women is greater than that of men and provides a more complete record of immigrant mobility overall. Findings for individual racial/ethnic groups accord with some expectations in the literature and contradict others.     

Prenatal Health,Educational Attainment,and Intergenerational Inequality: The Northern Finland Birth Cohort 1966 Study

In this article, we study the effects of prenatal health on educational attainment and on the reproduction of family background inequalities in education. Using Finnish birth cohort data, we analyze several maternal and fetal health variables, many of which have not been featured in the literature on long-term socioeconomic effects of health despite the effects of these variables on birth and short-term health outcomes. We find strong negative effects of mother’s prenatal smoking on educational attainment, which are stronger if the mother smoked heavily but are not significant if she quit during the first trimester. Anemia during pregnancy is also associated with lower levels of attained education. Other indicators of prenatal health (pre-pregnancy obesity, mother’s antenatal depressed mood, hypertension and preeclampsia, early prenatal care visits, premature birth, and small size for gestational age) do not predict educational attainment. Our measures explain little of the educational inequalities by parents’ class or education. However, smoking explains 12%—and all health variables together, 19%—of the lower educational attainment of children born to unmarried mothers. Our findings point to the usefulness of proximate health measures in addition to general ones. They also point to the potentially important role played by early health in intergenerational processes.     

Health Endowment at Birth and Variation in Intergenerational Economic Mobility: Evidence From U.S. County Birth Cohorts

New estimates of intergenerational economic mobility reveal substantial variation in the spatial distribution of opportunity in the United States. Efforts to explain this variation in economic mobility have conspicuously omitted health despite it being a key pathway for the transmission of economic position across generations. We begin to fill this gap in the literature by examining the relationship between health endowment at birth and intergenerational economic mobility across county birth cohorts in the United States, drawing on estimates from two population-level data sets. Exploiting variation across counties and over time, we find a negative relationship between the incidence of low-weight births and the level of economic mobility as measured in adulthood for the county birth cohorts in our sample. Our results build on a large and growing literature detailing the role of early childhood health in the transmission of economic status across generations and suggest that the incidence of low-weight births is negatively associated with intergenerational economic mobility.     

When studying schooling is not enough: Incorporating employment in models of educational transitions

Several recent studies have demonstrated the importance of incorporating qualitative differentiation within educational systems in the study of class inequality in student transitions. We extend these endeavors by broadening the definition of differentiation to include participation in the labor market. As increasing proportions of students continue their educational journeys beyond compulsory schooling, they are considering not only whether to stay in school but also whether to simultaneously enter the world of work. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth of 1997 (NLSY97), we show that family background influences not only whether students make specific educational transitions but also whether they combine those educational transitions with work. Student trajectories are also path dependent, with employment during one educational transition being related to specific transition patterns at a later point in time. Considering how students combine school and work reveals another dimension of differentiation which can be exploited by socioeconomically advantaged families to “effectively maintain” inequality in educational outcomes.     

Patterns of Racial and Educational Assortative Mating in Brazil

Exchange of racial for educational status has been documented for black/white marriages in the United States. Exchange may be an idiosyncratic feature of U.S. society, resulting from unusually strong racial boundaries historically developed there. We examine status exchange across racial lines in Brazil. In contrast to the United States, Brazil features greater fluidity of racial boundaries and a middle tier of “brown” individuals. If exchange is contingent on strong racial boundaries, it should be weak or non-existent in Brazilian society. Contrary to this expectation, we find strong evidence of status exchange. However, this pattern results from a generalized penalty for darkness, which induces a negative association between higher education and marrying darker spouses (“market exchange”) rather than from a direct trading of resources by partners (“dyadic exchange”). The substantive and methodological distinction between market and dyadic exchange helps clarify and integrate prior findings in the status exchange literature.     

Cultural change and attitude change: An assessment of postrevolutionary marriage and family attitudes in Iran

This report is aimed at investigating beliefs and intentions of Iranian adolescents regarding marriage and family building approximately four years after the Islamic Revolution, which brought substantial political and cultural changes. Differences associated with gender and parental education were found in beliefs and intentions regarding marriage and family building. Also, the sample seemed to hold more traditional cultural values than did a comparable prerevolutionary sample of youth who were from the same geographical location and were of the same sex and parental educational background. However, it was found that even the groups from the lowest educational background showed some degree of nontraditional attitudes and intentions regarding marriage and family. Interpreting the findings in light of cultural observations and attitude change theory, it is argued that a certain degree of real attitude change has occurred, and is continuing, in the nontraditional direction among educated youth.     

Education Expansion, Educational Inequality, and Income Inequality: Evidence from Taiwan, 1976–2003

The expansion of higher education in Taiwan starting from the late 1980s has successfully raised the average level of education. Using the concept of the education Gini, we find that the educational inequality declined as average schooling rose during the period of 1976–2003. The impacts of a rising average schooling and a declining educational inequality are also tested empirically in this paper. The evidence supports that a higher level of average schooling will generate a lower income inequality. On the other hand, a lower educational inequality, as measured by education Gini coefficient, will also cause a lower income inequality. Skill-biased technological change that shifts the labor demand from unskilled workers toward skilled workers is the most likely cause for the rising income inequality in Taiwan. However, the trend of rising income inequality could be reversed due to possible future over-education and unemployment in the labor market.     

The Public Acceptance of Voluntary Childlessness in the Netherlands: from 20 to 90 per cent in 30 years

Within a relatively short period of 30 years, public acceptance of voluntary childlessness has increased enormously in the Netherlands. In this paper, we address two research questions, which we answer with data from 13 waves of the repeated cross-sectional survey Cultural Change in the Netherlands (CCN, 1965–1996). First, we investigate to what extent the increasing permissiveness is due to cohort replacement and to intra-cohort change. We find that between 1965 and 1980 the change is primarily due to intra-cohort (period) effects, whereas cohort replacement has become more important since 1980. Second, we address the question which social categories constitute the 10% of the population who do not accept voluntary childlessness. Church attendance—and not religiosity or religious socialization—turns out to be the most important factor. Low levels of income and education also negatively affect the acceptance of voluntary childless.     

Educational mobility and the fertility of black and white women

In a test of the minority group status hypothesis, this study examines the effect of intergenerational educational mobility on the fertility of black and white women. Regression analysis of data from the National Survey of Family Growth provides only limited support for the hypothesis that upwardly mobile black women have lower fertility than their white counterparts. The main finding is that the parity of upwardly mobile black women is influenced more strongly by educational origins (parents' education) than is the parity of upwardly mobile white women. Thus, future studies should consider the effects of social origins on racial differences in fertility.This article is a revised version of a paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, 23 August 1992, Pittsburgh, PA, USA.